mill. I found myself, having passed several darkish, steaming rooms
in which the white nudity of many men showed against the blue-gray of flannel shirts, and the drab colors of steam-damped khaki in the shadow--I found myself in an armchair, in a very tall, quiet room. I had a sense that there was a tall, slim bookcase, a great table covered with dirty copies of English funny periodicals, and empty, cardboard fag-packets.... But I was sitting, really, in Kensington Gardens in the broad, open turfed way that slopes from the Round Point to the Serpentine. And there was a murmuring couple, by a tree trunk, upon green penny chairs. (I don’t know that I wasn’t one-half of the couple.) And Maisie was playing with Mrs. Wicks, three trees off, and Beale Farange, a little too florid, flaming and bearded, to be really one of the best people, was bearing down upon them--or was it us?--in the shadow of the well-behaved foliage under the polite skies.
I was vaguely conscious of voices. My companion was talking to some one else--about some battalion of some regiment; about some division, not ours; about the nature of the trenches in front of _Bazentin-le-Petit_. But, at any rate, for the moment, the fictitious-real had got so much the upper hand of the real-real that I was as engrossed as any schoolboy reading Ivanhoe in the twilight. It is a good tribute to pay the master. He was dying then.
But I was vaguely unhappy too--unhappy about it all. I don’t mean that I was unhappy with the ire of the moralist--for I never set up to be a moralist. Only I felt the queer uneasiness that, in those days, one was beginning to feel when one came in contact with civilians.
One began to hear hollow voices, sounding portentous through closed shutters.
“Fall in there! A Company on the right. Towels on the left arm. Number off!”--voices coming from the roadway. And one looked up from one’s book, thinking the time had come for one’s bath. There existed again the tall room, with grayish wallpaper; the atmosphere of steam; the tall window; the tall bookcase, whose panes, behind thin, curved mahogany divisions showed a faded, stretched curtain of torn green silk. The table was less littered than it had been. It had a dusty, red baize cover, much stained with ink. I suppose this was the miller’s office. I don’t know what had become of my companion. He was a restless, energetic boy, always on the jump. Whilst I had been in the broad avenue in Kensington, he had probably pressed until they had got him a bath-cubicle cleaned and ready. At any rate, a very old Tommy of the Lincolns, toothless, whitehaired, with tunic undone and tarnished buttons, told me I must still wait whilst my bath was preparing.
He said I was mistaken in thinking that he was a noncombatant permanently in charge of the baths. He was just a Tommy of the Lincolns; he had come straight out of the trenches in front of _Bazentin-le-Petit_ the night before. Five days before that they had relieved us in the same trenches. Now another division had gone in. He had been put in charge of the baths that morning, so he hadn’t had time to clean his buttons, or even his rifle. He supposed he might get _strafed_ for that. Yes; it was trying, the life of the trenches for a man of his age. He was sixty-two--sixty-four--over sixty, at any rate.
I told him to stand easy, and he sat down on the other side of the large table and reached for an old pipe. Then he folded his wrinkled hands before him on the cloth, looked at me hopefully, and exclaimed: “I suppose you know the firm of Bolsover & Jupp of Golden Square. The great solicitors.”
I did not know them; but when I said I did not, he appeared so distressed: “What? Not the great solicitors? To the Mansion House, the Common Council, the Tilbury and Southend Railway!”--so distressed that I had to pretend at last that I did.
“Well!” he said. “I was clerk in their office for twenty-four years!”
Twenty----four----years! He seemed to think that the statement entitled him to feel an enormous pride. No doubt it did.
He must have had a streak of the adventurous in his composition--but no one could have seemed less adventurous or more static. As he sat there, his hands, whitened by dabbling all that day in bath water, and folded before him on the dirty red baize, he looked as if he had sat there all his life and as if he would never move. He was so faded that you would not have given him credit even for the amount of sharpness necessary to a solicitor’s clerk; you would have said that he was an aged shepherd on a bench outside the workhouse door. I think he was the most memorable figure of the war, for me.
Of course, one’s mind is capricious in these things--but this was his biography, of which I have forgotten nothing--though I have, of course, forgotten most of his exact words. For twenty-four years clerk to Messrs. Bolsover & Jupp, this man who now was mostly preoccupied with the fact that he would be “_strafed_” for not “cleanin’ ’is ’ipe ... I mean rifle, sir!” had gone at the age of forty-eight--to Canada, to make his fortune, nothing less! He had left two sons, both married, in London. He and his “missus” worked in a factory--a “notions” factory, which was then engaged in adding to the beauty of the world by manufacturing colored and embossed tin-lids; later it made fancy brass buttons and can-openers. “_Et comme il était très fort, hardi, courageux et avisé_”--he soon obtained, not like St. Julian the Hospitalier, the command of a battalion--but a wage sufficient to let him save money. They saved money, he and his missus, and after eight years, they built themselves a frame house--“a proper, warm ’aouse for them frosty winters and we had one of those ’ere proper iron stoves. Proper!”
On the first morning of the new house--I presume his missus had lit the proper stove--he was jest a-puttin’ on his collar, when he heard a crackling. He thought it was the frost in the apple trees, cracking the boughs. But, in forty minutes the house was gone.
He had meant to insure that afternoon. So he and his missus--he never described her, but I think she must have been a gallant soul--aged fifty-six a-piece, went back to boarding-house life and work in the “notion” factory. Next autumn, coming back from work one evening, he noticed in a neighbor’s lot, a fine apple tree. Proper, with apples on it, these ’ere large coddlins! He offered the neighbor two dollars for the apples on the tree and peddled them round the town.
In five years, at that trade, he had made enough to think of “retiring”. Then he see in the pipers that Hengland needed men. So he ses to his missus: “We’ve got money enough to do as we please. Let’s go and see what we can do to ’elp the ol’ gal....” As if Victoria had been still on the throne. They came to London, and he went to see the ol’ firm. His sons said to him: No, they were married men with families. “So I says to the missus: ‘I ain’t got no family, I ain’t.’” And he bought her an ’aouse at ’Endon and an annuity, through the ol’ firm. That had taken till February, 1916. He was apologetic over the delay, but he had wanted to see the ol’ woman settled comfortable.
February, 1916--it was then July. Thirteen weeks training, you see, and he had been two months in France, “mostly on this ’ere ol’ Somme.” He was sixty-one years and four months of age. And he said he felt tired.
There was about his narration nothing of the “narquois” humor of the cockney; but, colorlessly, as tired farm-laborers talk, he went on talking--as if it was just the Will of God. I met some of his officers a couple of weeks later and asked about him, but his story grew rather hazy. They found a Company Sergeant-Major who said he had thought the old man was a bit too old for his job in the trenches. I daresay the old man had found rough gentlenesses and kindly helping hands from his mate and the noncommissioned officers of his battalion. He would have, of course. So the C.S.M. had detailed him for caretaker at the baths. The old man had enlisted as being thirty years and six months of age--just half his years. The C.S.M. remembered that; but he didn’t know what had become of the man. He rather thought he had been killed on the 24/7/’16 by a shell pitched in the battle, but perhaps he hadn’t.
It was mostly his tired voice and his colorless narration that had impressed me with him. I didn’t think much about--I did not even realize--the rather stupendous Odyssey of a life he must have had until I stood on that balcony of the Paris theater, in the night, with the French officers. You see, it was anyhow such a tremendous Odyssey for every one there that a little more or less at the moment did not jump to the eye as mattering. But, underneath, in the subconscious mind, it mattered.
I daresay--nay, I am sure--that it was that quality that mattered to me more than anything else of the whole cause for thought that the war gave one. For me--apart from Lord Kitchener and Sir Edward Grey--there were few great figures of those years. Sir Edward Grey went out of course once war was declared: then Kitchener went. There remained this Tommy of the Lincolns and I think Lt. Morgan of my own battalion was then still alive. Henri Gaudier was certainly dead--and he, in my mind, was united to the Lincolnshire Private and Morgan. They had, all three, a certain serenity.
I wish I could remember Morgan’s initials. He had a brother, “I. H.”--a nice boy. I hope he is still alive.
But the Morgan who is dead sounded, as it were, exactly the same note as the Lincolnshire man--the note of tired but continuous laboring after a very hard life. You know the sort of effect a violin has when its strings are muted. It was like that.
I think Morgan must have had his last leave at the same time as myself when I went out the second time; but I don’t think we went out together. At any rate, we took together a very long railway journey--but I don’t remember why or where--probably because I spent it listening to the story of his life. I remember his tired movements as he took his knapsack down from the rack whilst the train was running into some terminus. And I remember it seemed to me to be a shame--on the part of destiny--that he should be going out at all. I met him next night in Coventry Street--and he did not seem to be getting much out of Coventry Street after dark. We stood talking for a minute, and then he disappeared among the prostitutes and the flash Jews. I expect we each said: “Good luck, old man,” for I believe he liked me, and I must have liked him very much.
He was killed, as I have said, by a _minenwerfer_ as he was going up a communication-trench on his first night. He was buried so that, in the morning when they found him, only his feet and legs were showing. He was probably not buried alive, because the officer who found him said that he was smiling. I like to think of that.
Because these were the men who needed--who _must_ have had if indeed there be a just God or even merely a deity who gives compensations--a period of sanctuary after their very hard labors. It doesn’t matter about you and me....
But poor old Morgan ... I don’t know what age he was. I daresay he was no more than thirty-two, little and brown and persistent--his face was thin, aquiline, and as if hardened and sand-blasted by the perpetual confrontation of winds full of hail. For he too had gone out to Canada--but as a boy, apparently without much capital, to work for wheat-farmers.
I suppose most people know something about working for Canadian farmers--the long solitudes, the distance of the towns, the protracted buggy rides over immense plains. Well, I seem to have an extraordinary sense of it--just from the way Morgan talked on that long train journey. I don’t know that I remember incidents. Perhaps I could. I remember that, knowing little about horses at the beginning, he was asked by the boss if he would take a helluva vicious team to the nearest township to fetch something, a plow, I think. And he had done it.
But the main of the story was just the long strain--long hours merging into long years, with the muscles always a little overstrained. Not much, but a little. Because, though gallant, persistent, and showing it as the Welsh do, he was small for wrestling with tree trunks and immense plains. I remember his saying that when he had dug holes for the posts of wire fencing, he poured water in so that the posts should freeze solid in their places.
Well, he too must have been “_hardi, courageux, et avisé_”--leading a long, uncolored life of sober chastity, without many visits to the townships even, let alone the towns. For, as he sat in the carriage, he said that he owned property--timber lots and other lots, bought out of the savings of a laborer.
And he spoke of going back there, _après la guerre finie_--with the serene resignation of a man with no other imaginable destiny before him. It was to be more toil and more toil and more toil. He did not, apparently, ask for--certainly he did not imagine--any other future. So that resignation is not the right word. Serenity is....
X
_From a Balcony_
One of the French officers, on the balcony of the theater, during the _entr’acte_ of _Lakme_, was describing, with that depressed neatness of quiet diction that is at the disposal of every educated Frenchman, the sleep of a French territorial on an uncompleted traverse. The others had, as it were--and as if by preconcertion--capped stories in lauding and pitying the _territoriaux_. These troops, it may be as well to point out, were something like the Labor Battalions that subsequently we raised. I fancy we had nothing of the sort at that date and indeed, between Hélie and Corbie I had lately seen the Guards’ Brigade doing fatigue that, in French-France would have been performed by old fathers and grandfathers. That, of course, is nothing to the discredit of that great brigade. As soon as battalions, brigades, or divisions came out of the trenches for a “rest”, they were given the cheerful jobs of repairing rear-line trenches, digging drains, cleaning out latrines, and the like. When we came out from the Somme for a “month’s rest”, first A Company, then B, C, and D were given an all-night fatigue--of mending the Albert-Amiens road! And in August! Then we were moved up into the salient.
At any rate, slowly, coldly, and without the shadow of a shade of cordiality, in the blackness of the Paris night, the French officers piled it up. We were not popular in France at that date, and I don’t know that, except as individuals, we deserved popularity. That does not matter. The fact remained that they were “out” to make one feel that from under every little cowering roof in France, from Orange as from the frontier by Mentone to the other frontier by Longwy, old, stiff men, with horny hands and faded eyes had marched over the endless roads with the poplars to their too-heavy labors amidst the bursting shells.... From under _every_ cowering roof of every township, town, hamlet, and parish; from every _arrondissement_; from every _subprefecture_; from every _departement_. Coldly, like inquisitors, in the darkness, they let me have that information. It was not really necessary. I knew it already. But I was too tired, harassed, dispirited to tell them so. I, too, was old for that job. _Atque ego_....
For I couldn’t get away from the conviction that they were talking at me with a purpose--that they were, in indirect terms, telling me that it was a scandal that the Brigade of Guards should be employed in clearing out latrines, work which, in French-France, was performed by the fathers and the grandfathers--the guards being tired out and worn down by such employment when they were such splendid fighting material and should have been really rested. I daresay our own war office would have answered that that was part of our discipline and that “fatigues” when men were “resting” were good for their livers and kept them “fit”. There is such a school of thought. Anyhow, I am not writing a military treatise and do not ask that any attention should be paid to my views. I am only chronicling the psychology of an Infantry officer as he was affected by certain circumstances.
And I _couldn’t_ get away from the conviction that the French officers were talking “officially”. In those days there had just been published in Paris a book of “official” propaganda by myself. It would not have been a different book if it had been unofficial or if there had been no war. It simply advanced the theory that in the world of letters and ideas, for personal industry and pride in work as work, it is only France that matters among the nations. I had said that when I was twenty; I resaid it then being over double that age; I resay it today; and I will resay it as my eyes close in death. No one in my country has ever paid any attention to one’s saying it, and no one ever will. Why should they? Letters and ideas have so little place in our body politic and the doctrine of pride in work as work; of engrossment and of serenity; of aloofness from the world and of introspection with no other purpose--is here anathema both with the Right which hates the doctrine of Art for Art’s sake and with the Left, which hates that of Labor for the sake of Labor. Yet I see no other lesson in life. That is why I have collected these notes upon sheepfolds--this long lay sermon.
So this particular piece of official propaganda was, just then, being accorded an extraordinary amount of notoriety in France. The skill of our own propaganda people and the patriotism of distinguished Frenchmen accounted for that. It was reviewed at enormous length and with enormous headlines by Academicians, by assailants of the French Academy, and by the Mayors of Rouen, Lyons, and Toulouse. It was “communicated” to the Institute of France; publicly laid upon the shelves of the city library of Yvetot. And it was no doubt on that account that the French officers presented official views to me so carefully and so excruciatingly. They imagined that I had weight in the Councils of the Empire, as would have been the case in their own country.
While they talked the black houses round the market had infinite depths of violet against the white stars. But all the same I was looking at the view from the top of the great brick Roman Theater at Orange--over the flats with the ragged, stunted vines, the stubble, and the thatched roofs. Yes, I knew that beside Orange the little houses cowered beside the furrows and that on the other frontier great, gaunt piles were subsiding under scrolls and tongues of flame, going down to a last rest as the very tired men of a platoon will fall out beside the road. And the great buildings never get up again.
For I never feel that houses have souls. So that, when, out there, you saw a house go down as fire, it seemed to do it luxuriously almost. It was finished with men and their ways. It had no doubt borne for long with their cruelties, stupidities, imbecilities; with its windows for mournful eyes it had seen the generations flit past and fade. It had known cold that made its timbers crack and the great heat of the sun warping them. But beneath the flames, slowly, it would sink to the earth from which it had come. Yes, luxuriously, as men stretch themselves down for a long rest....
The French officer was still talking about the old territorial who had fallen asleep. It seems that the old man had gone on working, after his mates had been taken off for a spell, on the inner face of the traverse--which is a sort of pillar of earth with a gangway round it, left in a trench to minimize the lateral spread of shell fire. He had gone on working--out of pure zeal, the officer said. The officer addressed me with hard bitterness. I suppose he thought I was some sort of noncombatant. The staff-captain told me afterward that this officer, being aide-de-camp to one of the most famous French generals of division of the day had, the night before, attended his chief to a dinner--given, I think, by the British A.P.M.--in the course of which the heroic doings of a great many British Regiments were extolled. And then, in a pause, an English lady had said to the French general: “And the French haven’t done so badly.”... I was being made to suffer for this.
And I did suffer a good deal--more I think than I ever suffered. The officer went on and on about his old territorial. He was there, asleep, in the light of a single candle stuck in the clay. He was as it were spread-eagled against the earth. His legs apart he had raised his hammer to strike his chisel; both his arms were over his head, stretched out. And he was just asleep. It was touching; it was terrible in its simplicity, the officer said. He said the territorial came from Passy--as it might be Putney.
It was just at this point that I remembered Morgan and the old man of the bath-mill. I daresay you will think it merely a literary trick, when I say that I saw them.
But I _saw_ them: against an immense black mass fringed by flaming houses. I saw those two, tired faces; the two serene, honest, and simple souls, who had the Kingdom of God within them. And it seemed to me that they had died in vain.
It was for me the most terrible moment of the war.
I daresay that for many people it was the most horrible period of the war. For, by then it had become apparent that the Somme advance was a fiasco--a useless butchery. We knew we should never advance. I daresay the French knew it better than we. Certainly the voices of these officers drove it home: they spoke as if they were talking to a condemned criminal. And I think it was not right of them.
We, at any rate, were the old voluntary army. We had come, aged or young, from the ends of the earth. I don’t know whether it is worse to be old or young in a great war--it was bad enough to be old! And I don’t know whether it was better or worse to have come from the ends of the earth--or from Passy. Or to have passed all one’s life beneath a roof that shuddered with fear.... If you had done that, you were more used to the idea, and to the discipline of the idea, of war. You discussed the moves, here and there, more _en connoisseur_.
But I doubt if one of those men on the balcony felt the war as I did. We, after all, brought so many more emotions to it. You had only to contrast Paris, gray, sober, much as usual, with the roads under leisurely repair, and the old horses and the old _cochers_ and _voitures_ dawdling in the shadow of the plane-trees--with London, plastered with endless appeals in blue and scarlet and yellow--London, hurrying, exclaiming, clamoring.... The old territorial had lived all his life under the shadow--and it came. The old private of the Lincolnshires had never thought of such an end. But it came! And Europe flamed....
And the worst of it all was that one was beginning to doubt. Until then one had been carried by the fine wave of enthusiasm. It seemed to embrace the whole country. And we in all the holes, valleys, over all the downlands of the Somme, where the sun shone with its chalky rays as it does by L----, had had a great singleness of purpose and had been confident that we had the support of a great singleness of purpose extending across a world. But doubt had begun to creep in....
I wished, then, that I had not read “What Maisie Knew” in the bath at Albert. I wished that the daily papers would not reach us. The atmosphere shown so overwhelmingly in the book was beginning to be too close to the atmosphere reflected in the papers. And we were, truly, very lonely out there; truly we were some millions of men, suspended on a raft, in limitless space.
And we were beginning to feel a curious dislike of the civilians whom up till then we had so trusted--a curious dislike that was never to die. I don’t know what was going on at home: political intrigues no doubt; strikes possibly. But there seemed to prevail a tenuous, misty struggle of schemes--just the atmosphere of “Maisie.” I don’t think that many of those who were one’s comrades _in illo die_ did not at times feel a certain hopelessness. It was as if at times we said: What are those people after? Aren’t they--aren’t they surely?--“out” to make huge profits from our poor Tommies; to cut down the rations of our poor Tommies; and to gain notoriety by forcing on a timorous central government their own schemes for the training of poor Tommies--schemes that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our poor fine Tommies? And, when their own attractions were enhanced by the bringing off of this or that scheme, intrigue, or cabal, they would vote to themselves ribbons, orders, power, divorces, and the right to gallons of petrol. And so they would sit in the chairs of the lost and the forgotten amidst a world where the ideals which sent all those millions to destruction were lost too ... and forgotten. You will say that this is bitter. It is. It was bitter to have seen the 38th Division murdered in Mametz Wood--and to guess what underlay that!...
And then the French officer said what I knew he would say: what I had known that, with all his cold lack of rhetoric, he was working up to. He said that the old, sleeping territorial looked like Our Lord on Calvary. I could have screamed. Upon my soul I could have screamed. And, if I hadn’t thought it just possible that his dislike attached to me personally, I daresay I should have talked to him as I talked to the other French officer as the reader may see in _Une Partie de Cricket_. But the faint hope that it was just myself that he despised and not poor Morgan and the others--all the poor others along that long front of ours--that faint hope that he was attacking only me and not the Army of the Somme just made me hold my peace until we went back into the theater. And in the theater I suddenly remembered--as clearly as I had remembered the others--Henri Gaudier. He, too, seemed to stand before me and to smile at me a little, as if he found me comic....
I do not know why it is that now, when I think of Gaudier, the cadence that I hear in my mind should be one of sadness. For there was never any one further from sadness than Henri Gaudier, whether in his being or in his fate. He had youth; he had grace of person and of physique; he had a sense of the comic. He had friendships, associates in his work, loves, the hardships that help youth. He had genius, and he died a hero.
He comes back to me best as he was at a function of which I remember most, except for Gaudier, disagreeable sensations--embarrassments. It was an “affair”--one of two--financed by a disagreeably obese Neutral whom I much disliked. That would be in late July, 1914. The Neutral was much concerned to get out of a country and a city which appeared to be in danger. Some one else--several some ones--were intensely anxious, each of them, to get money out of the very fat, very monied, disagreeably intelligent being. And I was ordered, by _Les Jeunes_, to be there. It was a parade, in fact. I suppose that even then I was regarded as a, I hope benevolent, grandfather, by a number of members of an advanced school.[7] Anyhow, that comes back to me as a disagreeable occasion of evil passions, evil people, of bad, flashy cooking in an underground haunt of pre-war smartness.
I daresay it was not really as bad as all that--but when I am forced to receive the hospitality of persons whom I dislike, the food seems to go bad, and there is a bad taste in the mouth, symbol of a disturbed liver. So the band played in that cave and the head ached and there were nasty foreign waiters and bad, very expensive, champagne.
There were also speeches--and one could not help knowing that the speeches were directed at the Neutral’s breeches pockets. The Neutral leaned heavily sideways at table, devouring the bad food at once with gluttony and nonchalance. It talked about its motor car, which apparently was at Liverpool or Southampton--somewhere where there were liners, quays, cordage, cranes; all ready to abandon a city which would be doomed should Armageddon become Armageddon. The speeches went on....
Then Gaudier rose. It was suddenly like a silence that intervened during a distressing and ceaseless noise. I don’t know that I had ever noticed him before except as one amongst a crowd of dirtyish, bearded, slouch-hatted individuals, like conspirators; but, there, he seemed as if he stood amidst sunlight; as if indeed he floated in a ray of sunlight, like the dove in Early Italian pictures. In a life during which I have known thousands of people; thousands and thousands of people; during which I have grown sick and tired of “people” so that I prefer the society of cabbages, goats, and the flowers of the marrow plant; I have never otherwise known what it was to witness an appearance which symbolized so completely--aloofness. It was like the appearance of Apollo at a creditors’ meeting. It was supernatural.
It was just that. One didn’t rub one’s eyes: one was too astounded. Only, something within one wondered what the devil he was doing there. If he hadn’t seemed so extraordinarily efficient, one would have thought he had strayed, from another age, from another world, from some Hesperides. One keeps wanting to say that he was Greek, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t of a type that strayed: and indeed I seem to feel his poor bones moving in the August dust of Neuville St. Vaast when I--though even only nearly!--apply to him a name that he would have hated. At any rate, it was amazing to see him there; since he seemed so entirely inspired by inward visions that one wondered what he could be after--certainly not the bad dinner, the attentions of the foreign waiters, a try at the Neutral’s money-bag strings. No, he spoke as if his eyes were fixed on a point within himself; and yet, with such humor and such good-humor--as if he found the whole thing so comic!
One is glad of the comic in his career; it would otherwise have been too much an incident of the Elgin marble type. But even the heroism of his first, abortive “joining up” was heroico-comic. As I heard him tell the story, or at least as I remember it, it was like this:
He had gone to France in the early days of the war--and one accepted his having gone as one accepted the closing of a door--of a tomb, if you like. Then, suddenly, he was once more there. It produced a queer effect; it was a little bewildering in a bewildering world. But it became comic. He had gone to Boulogne and presented himself to the Recruiting Officer--an N. C. O., or captain, of the old school, white moustachios, _cheveux en brosse_. Gaudier stated that he had left France without having performed his military duties, but, since _la patrie_ was in danger, he had returned like any other good little _piou-piou_. But the sergeant, martinet-wise, as became a veteran of 1870, struck the table with his fist and exclaimed:
“_Non, mon ami_, it is not _la patrie_, but you who are in danger. You are a deserter; you will be shot.” So Gaudier was conducted to a motor, in which, under the military escort of two files of men, a sergeant, a corporal, and a lieutenant, he was whirled off to Calais. In Calais Town he was placed in an empty room. Outside the door were stationed two men with large guns, and Gaudier was told that, if he opened the door, the guns would go off. That was his phrase. He did not open the door. He spent several hours reflecting that though they manage these things better in France, they don’t manage them so damn well. At the end of that time he pushed aside the window blind and looked out. The room was on the ground floor; there were no bars. Gaudier opened the window; stepped into the street, just like that--and walked back to Boulogne.
He returned to London.
He was drawn back again to France by the opening of the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral. This time he had a safe conduct from the Embassy. I do not know the date of his second joining up or the number of his regiment. At any rate, he took part in an attack on a Prussian outpost on Michaelmas Eve, so he had not much delayed, and his regiment was rendered illustrious, though it cannot have given him a deuce of a lot of training. He did not need it. He was as hard as nails and as intelligent as the devil. He was used to forging and grinding his own chisels. He was inured to the hardships of poverty in great cities; he was accustomed to hammer and chisel at his marble for hours and hours of day after day. He was a “fit” townsman--and it was “fit” townsmen who conducted the fighting of 1914 when the war was won: it was _les parigots_.
* * * * *
Of his biography I have always had only the haziest of notions. I know that he was the son of a Meridional craftsman, a carpenter and joiner, who was a good workman and no man could have a better. His father was called Joseph Gaudier--so why he called himself B’jesker, I do not know. I prefer really to be hazy; because Gaudier will always remain for me something supernatural. He was for me a “message” at a difficult time of life. His death and the death at the same time of another boy--but quite a commonplace, nice boy--made a rather doubtful way quite plain to me.
All my life I have been very much influenced by a Chinese proverb--to the effect that it would be hypocrisy to seek for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low teahouse. It is a bad proverb, because it is so wise and so enervating. It has “ruined my career”.
When, for instance, I founded a certain Review, losing, for me, immense sums of money on it, or when the contributors unanimously proclaimed that I had not paid them for their contributions--which was not true because they certainly had among them a quantity of my money in their pockets--or when a suffrage bill failed to pass in the Commons; or when some one’s really good book has not been well reviewed; or when I have been robbed, slandered, or abortively blackmailed--in all the vicissitudes of life, misquoted on it, I have always first shrugged my shoulders and murmured that it would be hypocrisy to seek for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low tea-shop. It meant that it would be hypocrisy to expect a taste for the finer letters in a large public’s discernment in critics; honesty in æsthetes or literati; public spirit in lawgivers; accuracy in pundits; gratitude in those one has saved from beggary, and so on.
So, when I first noticed Henri Gaudier--which was in an underground restaurant, the worst type of thieves’ kitchen--these words rose to my lips. I did not, you understand, believe that he would exist and be so wise, so old, so gentle, so humorous, such a genius. I did not really believe that he had shaved, washed, assumed garments that fitted his great personal beauty.
For he had great personal beauty. If you looked at him casually, you imagined that you were looking at one of those dock-rats of the Marseilles quays, who will carry your baggage for you, pimp for you; garotte you and throw your body overboard--but who will do it all with an air, an ease, an exquisiteness of manners! They have, you see, the traditions and inherited knowledge of such ancient nations in Marseilles--of Etruscans, Phoenicians, Colonial Greeks, Late Romans, Troubadours, Late French--and that of those who first sang the Marseillaise! And many of them, whilst they are young, have the amazing beauty that Gaudier had. Later, absinthe spoils it--but for the time, they are like Arlésiennes.
All those wisdoms, then, looked out of the eyes of Gaudier--and God only knows to what he threw back--to Etruscans or Phoenicians, no doubt, certainly not to the Greeks who colonized Marseilles, or the Late Romans who succeeded to them. He seemed, then, to have those wisdoms behind his eyes somewhere. And he had, certainly, an astounding erudition.
I don’t know where he picked it up--but his conversation was overwhelming--and his little history of sculpture by itself will give you more flashes of inspiration than you will ever, otherwise, gather from the whole of your life. His sculpture itself affected me just as he did.
In odd places--the sitting rooms of untidy and eccentric poets with no particular merits, in appalling exhibitions, in nasty night clubs, in dirty restaurants one would be stopped for a moment in the course of a sentence by the glimpse of a brutal chunk of rock that seemed to have lately fallen unwanted from a slate quarry, or, in the alternative, by a little piece of marble that seemed to have the tightened softness of the haunches of a fawn--of some young creature of the underwoods, an ancient, shyly-peopled, thicket.
The brutalities would be the work of Mr. Epstein--the other, Gaudier. For Gaudier’s work had just his own, personal, impossible quality. And one did not pay much attention to it simply because one did not believe in it. It was too good to be true. Remembering the extraordinary rush that the season of 1914 was, it appears a miserable tragedy, but it is not astonishing, that one’s subliminal mind should whisper to me, every time we caught that glimpse of a line: “It is hypocrisy to search for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low tea-house.” It was of course the devil who whispered that. So I never got the sensation I might have got from that line. Because one did not believe in that line. One thought: “It is just the angle at which one’s chair in the restaurant presents to one an accidental surface of one of these young men’s backs.”
And then a day came when there was no doubt about it. Gaudier was a Lance Corporal in the 4th Section, 7th Company, 129th Regt. of Infantry of the Line.[8] Gaudier was given his three stripes for “gallantry in face of the enemy”. One read in a letter:
“I am at rest for three weeks in a village, that is, I am undergoing a course of study to be promoted officer when necessary during an offensive.”
Or in another letter:
“I imagine a dull dawn, two lines of trenches, and in between explosion on explosion with clouds of black and yellow smoke, a ceaseless noise from the rifles, a few legs and heads flying, and me standing up among all this like to Mephisto--commanding: ‘_Feu par salves à 250 mètres--joue--feu!_’
“Today is magnificent, a fresh wind, clear sun, and larks singing cheerfully....”
That was it!
But just because it was so commonplace; so sordid, so within the scope of all our experiences, powers of observation, and recording, it all seemed impossible to believe that in _that_ particular low tea-house there were really Youth, Beauty, Erudition, Fortune, Genius--to believe in the existence of a Gaudier! The devil still whispered to me: “That would be hypocrisy!” For if you would not believe that genius could show itself during the season of 1914, how _could_ you believe that, of itself, inscrutable, noiseless, it would go out of our discreditable world where the literati and the æsthetes were sweating, harder than they ever, ever did after _le mot juste_ or the Line of Beauty, to find excuses that should keep them from the trenches--that, so quietly, the greatest genius of them all would go into that world of misery.
And then I read:
“_Mort pour la patrie._
“After ten months of fighting and two promotions for gallantry, on the field, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, in a charge at Neuville St. Vaast. June 5, 1915.”
Alas, when it was too late, I had learned that, to this low tea-shop that the world is, from time to time the Sacred Emperor may pay visits. So I began to want to kill certain people. I still do--for the sake of Gaudier and those few who are like him.
For the effect of reading that announcement was to make me remember with extraordinary vividness a whole crowd of the outlines of pieces of marble, of drawings, of tense and delicate lines at which, in the low tea-house of the year before’s season, I had only nonchalantly glanced. The Sacred Emperor, then, had been there. He seemed, at last, to be an extraordinarily real figure--as real as one of the other sculptor’s brutal chunks of granite. Only, because of the crowd one hadn’t seen him--the crowd of blackmailers,[9] sneak-thieves, suborners, pimps, reviewers, and the commonplace and the indifferent--the Huns of London. Well, it became--and it still more remains! one’s duty to try to kill them. There are probably several Sacred Emperors still at large--though the best of them will have been killed, as Gaudier was.
* * * * *
It was whilst I was inside the theater that I registered, as the saying is, a mental vow that I would pay no attention any more to public affairs. To do so would drive one mad. I decided that I must put my head down under the cloth for the rest of the war. And I think I did so. Except for the occasional duty of writing propaganda--which from that time onwards I did in French--I paid no more attention to the politics of my country or the world. I just did the collar-work of the Infantry Officer until the 11/11/’17. After that, my views being too favorable to France, the Ministry of Information and the censor suppressed or lost in the post my rather excited writings on the Terms of Peace.... That would be about three years ago today. It seems a long while....
The inside of the theater was brilliant, formal, a little shabby if you looked closely. Of the performance of _Lakme_--an opera that I love very much, since the music is soft, moving, and generous--I remember very little. So it must have been a good rendering with no performer in particular “sticking out”. The British naval officers were rather funny. And I think it is no left-handed compliment to the composer, Délibes--though it may be to the librettist--to say that my thoughts were elsewhere. The music was just sensuous pleasure; the aspect of the house, spreading round in great lines of polychromatic humanity, more regular than is the case with most theaters in London--more suave and more classical--soothed one after what was certainly an emotional crisis; an escaped danger. For it would have mortified me for the rest of my life if I had burst out under the goadings of the French officers. But, by the Grace of God and the skin of my teeth, I had retained, quite certainly, my aspect of insular phlegm.
Still it had been exhausting--and I was enervated. And then, quite suddenly, it came to me to wonder what was going on outside the theater--what was going on under the black roof of the night, with the infinitely numerous population of leaves, blades, branches, reeds beside streams, great trees in the woodlands--and with the silent, watchful population of the thickets where the shadows are so extremely deep. I found myself wondering what time of year it was. And I said: the first weeks of September. For that morning I had recollected that, two years before on that day, the Germans had turned back from in front of Paris. Forty-six years before they had won the battle of Sedan.
It was, then, during the first weeks of September. But what happened--in September? One forgot. One had repaired trenches; one had commanded fatigues digging drains round Bn.H.Q., to the left of Mount Kemmel. One had dug so efficiently that, during the first thunderstorm the repaired trenches below were neck-deep in water. All that had passed in “the Country”.
But what happened in September? There were no doubt apples on the trees, and, certainly, it was the time of year when many cobwebs, frail nets across the tall grasses on commons or single, brilliant filaments, streamed out and glistened on still, bright days.
There would be plums, too; but what about damsons? Wasn’t it early for them? And how about garden peas? Were they over? And field peas? And would there be an autumn feel in the air?
It was twenty-one days to Michaelmas--and Michaelmas certainly brought the autumn feeling, with touches of vine in the shadow of yellowing plants and the leaves of sunflowers drooping straight down, like unfurled colors on windless days. But in copses, shaves, and spinneys were the leaves on forest trees yet turning? Were roads yet hard and frosty in the morning? And were horses yet sluggish and apt to stumble on roads as they do at the turn of the year and the fall of the leaf?... Time to give ’em a ball.
The baffled mind seemed to stumble at all these questions. One was in the theater and having been forbidden by the will to think that what surrounded the great walls with their human lining was a vast black map fringed by conflagrations, the poor mind hung faltering.
It fell suddenly back on contemplating the green nook that--on the down behind Albert--it had reserved for itself. Yes, the mind actually did that. And, across the gilding of the proscenium, across Lakme’s singing the great song of yearning, there hung a slight shimmer of green that intensified itself and took shape like a recumbent oval.... And there began to become visible the yellowing, grayish rows of broad beans; a rather ragged hedge and a little stream beyond, level with the grass and fringed with the glistening stems of clumps of rushes that had been cut for thatching stacks. Because it was indeed September.
[Footnotes]
[7] For the benefit of the uninstructed reader, I may say that new Schools of Art, like new commercial enterprises, need both backers with purses and backers of a certain solid personal appearance or weight in the world. And it is sometimes disagreeable, though it is always a duty, to be such an individual.
[8] The knowledgeable reader will observe that here Gringoire has consulted the monograph on Gaudier by Mr. Pound--the best piece of craftsmanship that Mr. Pound has put together; or at least the best this writer has read of that author’s.
[9] Gringoire is too fond of this word--which he uses in a special sense to indicate persons--mostly reviewers--who do not appreciate the work of himself and his school. In his conversation he introduced at this point a long denunciation of the ---- Literary Supplement, principally because, whilst purporting to be a literary paper, it devotes, according to him, 112/113ths of its space to books about facts, at the expense of works of the imagination. So he calls that respectable journal a blackmailing organ. Since, however, this is a topic that can hardly interest the non-literary, and since the literary are hardly likely to read these pages, the compiler has taken the liberty of not reporting these sallies. It may be true that Pontius Pilate is more criminal than the crucified thieves--but it is _never_ politic to say so.
XI
_“Rosalie Prudent”_
One evening the compiler addressed Gringoire, who was making notes in a seed catalogue, somewhat as follows:
“Do you remember, oh Gringoire, what it is to awake of a September morning at dawn? Being _horticulteur_, your first thought will be for the weather: being _poète_, your first thought will be for your new volume. And the two first thoughts will overlay the one the other, according as chance wills. But the still mist is so reassuring as to the weather that you can put that aside and think only of your volume. The goodly fruits of the earth in the late summer season, the plums, the apples, the quinces; the maize, the marrows, the melons, have yet another day, for sure, of bright, warm sun, of gorgeous, mellow downward shavers of sun. They, surely, shall stand motionless in the warmth.
“But the poems ... oh my poor Gringoire of the dawn: the great, half-finished epic! Ah that! that seemed so glowing too when last night in the golden light of the two candles, in your poor little, rickety salon that yet has a style of its own ... you read them to Madame Sélysette ... the poor verses that you read so famously to little Madame!... In the dawn, ah, the wolf of the night that says: ‘Hou ... hou’ from the mountains has not gone home! Almost you hear his sniffing round the little green door that, because yours is a land of idylls and the innocent, you have left open. One day the wolf with the great, cocked hairy ears, with the long white teeth like razors for their sharpness shall come in. You will hear upon the uncarpeted stairway the pad of the feet; the little thin door will push open, and raised at the foot of your small white bed, you will see the great beast; the huge head; the bloodshot eyes.... And Madame, in the other little white bed across the small white room will moan a little in her sleep....
“All the poor verses: the little lines! How shall they be the barbed wire fence that shall keep the wolf from the door of the cottage? Why, he could push the poor, tindery old walls down with his snout! The poor verses! They halt ... or no, they do not halt. We are too good a craftsman for that! But assuredly they do not run. And the publisher! What shall he say? And Madame with such a need of a new gown: it should have been of velvet, puffed in the arms, and slashed to show an undercoat of crushed rose silk. And to tell the truth--your _pantalons?_ How they shine in the seat, like a mirror! And the public! Ah, the grim public that has no taste but for dominoes in the cafés of an evening! How shall they care for the savor of lavender and rosemary in your smaller verses? What, to them, are Melpomene and Mélisande and Maleine and Musidore of your epic! And the cursed ‘machinery’ of the enormous poem! What has become of your great device that was to take the story forward from line 1100 to line 1424? Forgotten! O Apollo! O Euterpe! Forgotten--gone--your brain is failing. Your diet of oatmeal and junket is not enough to water your gray matter with rich red blood. It is all over ... and the great wolf says ‘Hou!... hou!’ upon the mountains, though the mists are rising. And Madame, you can see, is smiling in her sleep! Ah! When you are suspended by your cravat from the old thorn tree, she will marry the rich son of the apothecary....
“And then ... suddenly you remember! Maleine became a rose tree, and the slipper of glass was hidden in a bath.... Yes: it was like that. The device has come back to you. Hurray! Hurray! And the verses shall glow and sparkle. And damn the public and damn and damn the publisher, and Madame is a sweet, plump angel.
“And you spring from your bed, oh Gringoire, but with the footfall of a panther for fear the creaking of the very old oak floor boards should awaken your own Sélysette. And quick and quick to your dressing room, which is on state occasions the spare bedroom. Then you wash in the brick-floored kitchen. And how crisp and reviving is the cold water on the skin--just as it used to be when you came out of the tent or the dugout or the hut, down before Péronne in the old days. And there is no war.
“No war to awaken the birds that are still sleeping in the massed shadows of trees all unmoving in the deep mists. A noble, long, quiet, warm day of September is before you. A day of _moissons_ and _vendanges_, ripening securely, still; with line added to line in the morning; and nothing to do in that rich little garden of yours; and line added to line of the epic all the afternoon. And a stroll in the level, sinking rays of the sun with Madame Sélysette, like a mysterious _jeune fille_ once more, to sing to you, in the carefreedom of her heart, the song of the raggle-taggle gipsies, oh....
‘Oh what care I for my goose-feather-bed The sheets turned down so bravely oh! Tonight I’ll sleep on a cold open heath Along with the raggle-taggle gipsies, oh!’
as she was used to sing it in the days when she left the roof of her father, the so very rich goldsmith of Toulouse, to take up with you, oh my so very poor poet. _Vogue la galère!_ I hear you say. For are there not fine cabbages in the garden; and the haricots and the tomatoes all a-ripening! And does not Madame make an incomparable _potage bonne femme_ with these things and a few little bones! A fig for the wolf! And if she cannot have her gown of velvet--when do her dark eyes sparkle more vivaciously than when in her black hair she wears a coronal of the scarlet berries of bryony? And if the _pantalons_ shine in the seat, let them shine till they wear through! And then there will be a piece of sacking to insert, whose remainder shall stuff up the holes of the so very old roof. And Melpomene and Mélisande and Musidore shall dance to the tune of green sleeves round the rose tree that was Maleine! Aye, they shall dance in the sun till the crystal slipper falls out of the bath of dew. And already Phœbus Apollo has chased into the farthest recesses of the Alpilles the craven old wolf....
“And, fastening your collar, you rush into the room where Madame is asleep, and you shout out:
“‘I have it! We will put Sweet Williams, and behind them Canterbury Bells, and behind them Hollyhocks, in the bed along the path. And tulips before the door!’
“It is true that the Hollyhocks will then be to the south of the Canterbury Bells, and they again to the south of the Sweet Williams--the tall plants standing in the light of the short ones, which is against the maxims of safe gardeners. But we must chance something, as we chance life when we are so very poor and so very simple and have to adventure down the years with no stores of gold, under a very old roof with half the tiles off. And besides: maybe next summer will be a very dry summer, and then the shade of the Hollyhock on the Canterbury Bells, and of the Canterbury Bells on the Sweet Williams will be a positive benefit....
“And, truly, in all the gardening year--which is all pleasure except for such lets and hindrances as God decrees to you in order that you may remember that you are human--there is no pleasure to equal the pleasures of a mid-September day. For there is promise in the chrysanthemums; the asters, petunias, and geraniums are still bright; marrows, pumpkins, gourds, maize, plums, apples, pears, damsons are drinking in the sun and turning all the colors from rich green to orange and tomato-scarlet. There are still flowers on the roses and on the sweet-pea hedge. And, if those foliages are thinning, through their silver and yellow haze you can see the bright mosaic of next summer’s beds! Ah, brave mid-September!”
* * * * *
To this Gringoire answered--a little grimly:
In a mid-September twilight, the rain poured down on Pont-de-Nieppe. Depressed Highlanders lounged along the street in front of the row of villas that ran from the church to the rear of the town--taking our own lines as the front. One’s horse and one’s orderly’s horse slipped disagreeably on the wet granite setts of the pavé, and one seemed to have gone backwards and forwards, in a deluge over greasy roads for hours and hours--for a whole lifetime. One seemed never to have done anything else. It was a billeting job that we had been sent upon. And, when we had billeted everything we could think of, there still remained some disreputable other ranks connected with the divisional canteen, for whom we had not found holes, corners, and a shop. And the division we were relieving had apparently vanished and so had the Town Marshal, whilst the _Maire_ was so obliging that he placed the whole, empty town at our disposal. It would have helped us more if he had been less obliging and had dictatorially provided us with one shop into which to stick the canteen and its confounded sutlers. And it poured, and we continued to wander about the empty streets. And it poured--and, in the most unexpected places, the disreputable Acting Lance Corporal in charge of Divisional Canteen would bob up, touch his cap like a London cab-runner and exclaim, always in three breaths: “Xcusemesir; may-I-speak-to-you-sir; have-you-found-a-billet-for-the-Divisional-Canteen-sir?” He was a most annoying person, a London music hall “turn” in peace time. He occupied his leisure moments behind the Canteen Counter in writing “sketches” for London Halls, like the Hoxton Empire, at fifty pounds a time. Sometimes he would appear alone or would emerge alone from the chalk-rubbish and festoons of wallpaper of an empty shop. Sometimes he would have behind him a disreputable French country cart loaded with sardine tins, sticks of shaving soap, cigarette packets, cratesful of wet dates, writing tablets--God knows what. And the horse--or it may have been a mule--seemed to be a hundred years old. And rain dripped from its ears. And rain poured on the disagreeable objects in the tilt cart and on the three impossible Tommies who went with it. And they would have backgrounds of black, wet houses, without roofs, but with lace window curtains dripping in all the empty window spaces; and wet, smashed chairs and commodes and wardrobes hung drunkenly over holes in the floors of houses that had no front walls. And it poured. And twilight deepened.
Then a battalion came in along the Bailleul road; a poor, smashed battalion, with men limping and men under whose tin hats there gleamed white bandages, very conspicuous in the rain and the mud and the dark, wet khaki. And a battalion looks grim indeed when it has been hammered by artillery, on a Macadam road without chance of retaliation--owing to a blunder of a staff officer. They had, I think, 160 men killed in one company--pretty well the whole strength as battalions were in those days. I don’t like to think of it, much.
And yet, such is poor human nature, that both I and my companion said, “Thank God!”--as we had never said, “Thank God” in our lives before. At least I know that I said “Thank God” as I had never in my life said it before--and as I never shall again. For it wasn’t our battalion that had been smashed by direct shell-fire on the Macadam road--Loire--Dranoutre--Neuve Eglise--Plugstreet--Nieppe. Imagine such a route--in full view of the Hun trenches! Why, riding that way the day before, to prospect next day’s billets, I and another officer had had three shells directed to us alone by the German artillery--between Dranoutre and Neuve Eglise! So imagine what it would be for a battalion. And we had seen orders which said that _our_ people were to leave Loire at such and such an hour and to march by Companies--presumably in column of route!--in the Dranoutre-Neuve Eglise-Plugstreet road! And the Divisional Transport Officer had told us early in the afternoon that, as we had _known_ would be the case, our battalion had been hammered to pieces. A whole Company had been wiped out on that road--marching in column of route.[10] “A” Company, he had said, our own company!
Half the time during the afternoon, the other officer and myself--soaked to the skin and pestered by the farcical Lance-Corporal in Charge of Canteens--who, poor devil, was only doing his duty--had said, from horse to horse: “I wonder if Johnny A-- has gone west! I wonder if Fred B-- has copped it!...” It is horrible, that!
And then, in the rain, under the castle wall, we heard from a very bleeding man of the other Battalion that our own people, after all those of the W-- Regiment had been murdered, had been diverted from the Dranoutre-Neuve Eglise road to the Locre-Bailleul-Armentières highway, which was, in those days, as safe as a church.
So we two, watching the men of the other Battalion march resentfully by, could say “Thank God” to ourselves.
Relief, naturally, manifested itself in the two of us, according to our separate temperaments. My friend--he was an Irish Nationalist, almost a Sinn Feiner--said:
“G ..., old dear. You’re Division. I’m only Battalion. The canteen is your job. I think I’ll get to my digs.” He added, a bit bashfully, that in his digs there was a French girl who was going to give him lessons in her difficult tongue. I said, “All right. ’Op it.” [I remembered saying ‘’Op it!’ in an intense weariness.] But, as I turned my tired old horse once more down the road to find a billet for that accursed corporal of Divisional Canteen, I was, I remember, thinking innumerable things, all at once.
Firstly: my shirtcuffs were very frayed, and the rain had made them more diabolically wet and cold than you can imagine. Then I was actually bothering about the wretched staff officer who had murdered all those men. I was worried about him. You see, it would be such a trifling thing to do--as easy as forgetting--as every human soul has done in its day--to post a letter. He would have an ordnance map and a pencil. The map would show the contours, but probably it would not show the German trenches or the German artillery emplacements. He would rule a pencil line from Locre to Armentières, he would see that the Dranoutre-Neuve Eglise road was nearly level, running indeed along the flat at the edge of Flanders. On the other hand the Locre-Bailleul-Armentières road went up steeply from the Belgian frontier to Bailleul--a road in the dusty sunlight, the rough unshaded country, between tobacco and grain fields. And it was 1500 yards longer. So, in the kindness of his heart, he had saved the men the extra distance, the shadelessness, and the dust of a road over the foothills bordering Flanders. He had forgotten the Hun artillery--_just_ as you or I might forget to post a letter!
And, as I rode past the workmen’s villas, for the hundredth time, I was imagining that poor Acting Assistant Brigade Major, with his pink cheeks and his red hat, being strafed to hell by our frightful General of Division. He might almost cry!... But I daresay it wasn’t at all like that, really.
Anyhow, I was being dreadfully sorry for him. At the same time, I was trying--if I may use a professional novelist’s word--to psychologize the German gunner. He wouldn’t believe his luck. He _couldn’t_ believe his luck. He would believe it was some accursed scheme of the diabolically cunning English to discover his position. There, through his telescope, he would see a solid cube of wet-brown, moving slowly along a perfectly visible road. He would see it with his naked eye--a cubical caterpillar as large as a whole range of farm buildings. It would be incredible to him. No doubt he would ring up his immediate superior, and they would confer over the telephone. He would tremble for his battery. The English were no doubt drawing some sort of canvas wind-screen, camouflaged to look like a company, along that Macadam road. They would be trying to draw his fire so as to discover his position. Then they would blow his battery to hell with new, unimaginable High Explosive Shells, or mines, or anything. So he would fire--and see 160 men killed. “Drum fire,” I think the Germans called it. The complete Company would be wiped out--a mark such as a German gunner would hardly dare to pray for in his dreams. And nothing would happen to him. Nothing. He would wait. But nothing!
Then he would thank the Creator....
I don’t know really what happened to me then. I have said that that deluge of a twilight seemed to last a thousand years. I was wrong: it seemed to last two thousand years. I remember meeting the Divisional Transport Officer out in an immense expanse of mud near an incredibly dirty farmhouse--in a sea of brown liquid that was supposed to be the Station Road. And I know that the field stank. It smelled unimaginably--though I don’t know why a field should smell. I can still smell it.
The Transport Officer said that that was the field allotted to him by Division. He said to hell with the lake of mud. _He_ was going to put the Transport on the Bailleul-Steenewerck road. He gave the number on the map, “R. 14,” I think it was. I said I should take the field for the Divisional Canteen. There were, scattered--possibly floating--about it some Connaught huts that resembled Noah’s Arks adrift in a sewage farm. The Transport Officer said all right. I fancy he was not interested in the Divisional Canteen.
As we rode slowly, again past the workers’ villas, the Lance-Corporal in Charge of Divisional Canteen again waylaid me, springing up apparently out of the mud. He said: “Xcusemesir, may I speak to you, sir ... I’ve fahnd a ’ouse be’ind the Ch’ch for the D’vish’n’l C’nteen.”
I think I went mad at that point, and the Transport Officer rode slowly away. I don’t remember what I said to the Lance-Corporal. I hope I never shall.
The trouble was that, in that town, there was a danger zone. For the last four days, the Germans had been shelling the church. From 6:00 P.M. until midnight, in their methodical manner, every quarter of an hour they had dropped a 5–9 shell into the sacred edifice. The danger zone was therefore perfectly circumscribed and perfectly definite. But, unfortunately for me, though I had been warned that there _was_ an official danger zone, no one that I met knew where it was. The town marshal had gone; the Divisional Police who were already working typewriters in his office were our Divisional Police, not those of the Division that had gone too. They knew nothing about the dangerous area. And some Australian humorist had removed all the cautionary boards that should have surrounded the church and had grouped them round a large iron public convenience which was the chief architectural adornment of the main street. There they looked alarming but improbable.
It was therefore not to be thought of that the L. C. and his men should remain in a house just under the shadow of the church--for it was plain that, however big or however circumscribed the official danger zone might be, what the Huns were shelling was the church. We had been in the church in the course of the afternoon. It was a commonplace building, as far as I can remember, Byzantine of an eighteenth century type. But it was, in a way, rendered gracious by the enormous heaps of plaster and stone-dust that piled against the walls in drifts, so that it was as if sand dunes had invaded the roofless edifice. And, in the course of the dusk, shells had landed in all that rubble, constantly, no doubt regularly, whilst we were pursued by the L. C. round the church square, in the rain that had begun to fall just as the Huns began to shell....
I daresay the reader will by now be tired of the Lance-Corporal in Charge of Canteens. I know _I_ was. And I am uncertain what became of him. I daresay I could remember if I made an effort--but it hardly seems worth while. I know that four days later he was safely writing a music-hall sketch, in a tent, under a counter made of soap boxes, in a field just beyond the turning where the Plugstreet road leaves the chaussée from Bailleul to Nieppe; and I know that next night I got out of my flea-bag at about 2:00 A.M. and wearily walked for miles and miles in search of him and his sardine tins. The Huns had started regularly bombarding the town at that inconsiderate hour, and I know too that, when I did find him, by chance, wandering about with his disreputable cart and his four disreputable men, he said that a shell had gone clean through the upper story of the shop that they had commandeered. So I suppose that that night he had slept in the town. I can’t remember.
I can remember interviewing the _Maire_ a second time and that, because he was busy with some French staff officers, I had to wait some minutes--in a dentist’s waiting-room, with aspidistras, black walnut furniture, and innumerable copies of the illustrated paper called _Excelsior_ on the lace table-cover. For the _Maire_ was a dentist. He was also a brave man. I can remember, too, being in a shop just under the church where a young, stout Belgian Jewess was standing waist deep in remnants and rags of black satin. She was nonchalantly packing this away in sacks whilst I tried to make sense out of her middle-aged, frightened father. I think I was telling him that seven francs a day was too much to expect the Division to pay for the rent of a rag and bone shop. Something hit the roof at that moment and an avalanche of bones, old iron, and satin petticoats poured down the stairs from the upper floors. The father disappeared, exclaiming “Oi! Oi!” and elevating his hands above his bared head. But the daughter, with a large face, chalk-white with powder, heavy blue-black hair, and an opulent inscrutability--she had on her large white fingers a great collection of fat-looking wedding rings--went on nonchalantly examining black satin petticoats, rejecting some, folding others slowly, and packing them away in sacks. She seemed to regard the thing that had passed through the upper story with enigmatic indifference, as if shells and iron hail were just part of the silly vanity of the male sex. Her business was to pack up for transport on a barrow to Armentières all the black satin that she and her father had collected and that had once belonged to the inhabitants of the empty town.
That attitude seemed to be common enough in the women of those parts. I remember looking, five minutes later, through the bull’s-eye glass of a cottage window so low that you would say every shell must pass over it. The interior was candle-lit and quite tranquil.
At trestle tables, gesticulating although they had their elbows on the boards, sat eight Tommies of the battalion whose entry we had witnessed. Five had bandages, and three had not. Between their elbows they had tinplatesful of fish and chips. And there were two women, standing. One, middle-aged and stout, had her hands on her hips, and her elbows back. Her blouse was well open at the neck, as if it had been hot work cooking the fish and chips. She stood against a trestle table and seemed to be giving back-chat to all the eight Tommies at once. The other was a young girl--of the Flemish Madonna type. Her yellow hair was tightly braided round her head; she leaned back against the mildew-stained wall, and on her bare, crossed arms she had a tabby kitten. It was biting her finger, and she stood entirely quiet, as if on her hands she had all the safety and all the time in the world.
I daresay it was safe enough for the moment. But, some days later, I noticed that there was no cottage there. There was not even a lace curtain.
I walked along--for I had got rid of my tired horse--a long way, under the dripping trees that were black above the wall of the château, and out onto the Bailleul road, a long way beyond the Plugstreet turning, I persuaded myself that I was going to ask the Divisional Transport Officer to house my friends of the Canteen in tents in his field.
I found him in the W---- lines. They were eating Welsh rabbit and herrings in a Connaught hut. They were not pleased to see me. There was an old Quartermaster from Stratford-on-Avon--a butcher by profession, think of that!--who sat with his hands crossed over a large stomach and spectacles well down on his nose. Also he wore carpet slippers. He told me in a most businesslike way that they had only herrings enough for three. I was welcome to any amount of Welsh rabbit--but there were only herrings enough for three. And they were three already.
Then I realized that what I was really concerned about was to see my own Battalion come in. It was symptomatic. My friend the Sinn Feiner had been perfectly content, as soon as he had seen the W----’s come in and knew that our own people had been diverted, to go and take lessons in the language of the country from the French young lady whom he had unearthed. But, as for me, I wanted to _see_ the Battalion. I had no particular reason to love the C.O. or the Sergeant Major. But I wanted to be absolutely _sure_ that they were safe.
And, just as I got back to the crossroads near the church, the Battalion came in. There was the C.O. riding, the Sergeant Major walking ahead of him. And then “A” Company. I called out to Captain Gardiner, after I had saluted the Colonel: “A Company all right?” And the young man answered: “Cheerie Oh, old bird, as right as rain.” The last dregs of light were fading under the elms; the Huns were putting in some extraordinarily heavy stuff just behind them. And suddenly I remembered that I had not billeted myself. God knows whom we hadn’t billeted, the Sinn Feiner and I between us. Certainly three sets of battalion headquarters, transport, officers’ messes, sanitary squads, and the men of a whole brigade. But I had nowhere to lay my head. And my frayed shirt-cuffs were streaming with rain and it had grown pitch dark....
You say I am a poet. Certainly I am a poet!
And these eyes of mine that, when I have any leisure, see always not only the things that surround me, but many other things--these eyes of mine were busy. Certainly they saw what, in the darkness, was visible of the wet and stricken town. Against the sky the roof lines or the silhouettes of charred beams; the red glow of the candles in the fried-fish cottage; the red glow that slowly danced inside the church as if a black mass were going forward. I suppose the last shell had set fire to some woodwork. Then another came and put it out, so that it was darker.
But these eyes of mine that, with their attention, were looking at a bright landscape, had also registered in their memory a white, as if triangular patch, in a dark window of a house just behind the church, nearly opposite, but a little this side of the _Mairie_, a house that we had passed again and again. The eyes had noted that white luminosity and now made for it, though the thinking mind was differently intent. This sort of definition is a little difficult to make. Try to follow me. The department of my eyes that led me--the Intelligence Department--saw the roofs and the black streets; the department which was influenced by my desires--for a meal, for warmth, for a bed, and above all for dry shirt-cuffs--was leading my steps toward the house that had the pale luminosity in the dark window. And, what I suppose you would call my mind’s eye was occupied by a bright landscape. That is to say, I was definitely thinking about an August landscape.
You will say that it was the landscape I have mentioned so often--the landscape with the stream and the trees and the gingerbread cottage. But it wasn’t. That came later. I suppose that at that time I wasn’t tired enough to see it. Besides, I never saw that as if in bright sunshine or in the weather of any accentuated season--but always as just English country in just English weather, green earth in a diffused light under a July sky.... No, I was thinking of a billeting scheme. For, in the long ago--thousands and thousands of years ago--we used to do billeting schemes, round Manorbier and Penhally. And I think the one I was then thinking of with--as the prose writers say--laughter mixed with rain, took place at Penhally. It appeared an idealized Penhally, mostly hollyhocks and thatch, so wilful is the mind, though I remember every house of Penhally! Well: a great many of us went in the August weather to work a billeting scheme there. And an officer representing Division drove up in a Rolls-Royce and pretended to “confer” with us. He had a red hat-band and a golden lion and the beautifullest moustaches and the beautifullest white whip-cord breeches and _such_ spurs! And such ladies in the Rolls-Royce, awaited him!
And he gave us the loveliest hints in a clear voice, with the far-away expression of one who knows his job but lectures in it too often. Certainly he knew his job--and he was a fine fellow!
We were to get hold of the civil power at once, or at least as soon as we had conferred with the divisional billeting officer. The first thing to do was to find out about the water supply. Then we were to group our companies round the pump if we could. If there were only one, we were to call a conference of Company Quartermaster Sergeants and give out the time when each Company was to draw water. That would then go into Battalion Orders. He said, with a little smile, that we were to remember to put Battalion Headquarters into the best billet--because C.O.’s liked that--and Company messes must be lodged in public houses or places where there was liquor. So that the men shouldn’t get at the alcohol! Transport should, as a rule, be as far from fire as could be arranged, to avoid stampeding of horses; similarly with the Doctor’s cart and the Battalion cookers. And, as a rule, the Company detailed for the Advance Guard next day should have the advanced billets if there were no likelihood of a night attack. But they should not be exposed to disturbance in the night, if possible, because they would have a hard time next day. Similarly the Advanced Guard of that day should be halted first and be in the rear, so as to get a good night’s rest. He told us to remember those splendid words which used to be the shibboleth of every British officer--to the effect that the comfort and convenience of the men should be considered before every exigency save the necessities of actual warfare.
Yes: he was a fine young fellow--one of the Old Contemptibles, as he modestly, clearly, and rather absentmindedly, enunciated all that sound, commonsensible, old-fashioned lore of the Army. And I remember every word of it. For instance, men of separate units or even of separate Companies of the same Battalion should not be billeted on opposite sides of the same street; the street should be divided in half, and one-half allotted to each Company or unit. (I remember pointing that out to my Sinn Fein friend in one of the miserable, battered streets of workmen’s hovels in Pont-de-Nieppe that afternoon.)
But, though I had listened with all my ears to the Staff Officer at Penhally, my eyes, even then had been playing the trick of showing me Pont-de-Nieppe--just as at Nieppe in France they insisted on showing me Penhally in Wales. For, whilst I listened to him, I was seeing the time when I should represent Division and be, in the sunlight, young, with a beautiful moustache and a red hat-band and white whip-cord breeches, very full. And with _such_ spurs!
So there I was, representing Division.
It hadn’t been very like what I had pictured--and I had not had to bother about water supply.[11] I had enough water in the wretched, frayed wristbands of my shirt, as it seemed, to water a whole Battalion and the mules of the Transport! But, otherwise, the traditions of the Old Army had prevailed. Rudimentarily, no doubt, but still, they had prevailed. I had reminded the Battalion Billeting Officers to see that Battalion Headquarters had convenient buildings, that officers had charge of any civilian liquor depots; that Company cooker-cars had emplacements convenient for their men, and that latrines were not located near water supplies. Also, we had got into touch with the civil power.... Only, there were no ladies in my Rolls-Royce--and my Rolls-Royce was two very wet-kneed legs! And as for my shirt-cuffs ...
I suppose they were most in my mind. For it is the most horrible of human afflictions to have wet shirtcuffs! So that, when I found my orderly, not where I had told him to be--in comparative safety in front of the workmen’s villas but in the shadow of the door of the shop where the Jewess had packed up the black satin petticoats, waiting devotedly, though the shells that missed the church went close overhead--he said:
“She’s took all them petticoats on a barrer in sacks to Armentières,”[12] I answered:
“You can fall out. Tell my batman that I’ve gone somewhere to get my d--d shirt-cuffs dried.”
Nevertheless, he followed me. It was, you see, the pride of _métier_. Alas, that there should be no English for those words. He was my orderly for the day--just any orderly from headquarters. But I was his charge. If I had ordered him to fall out, no doubt he would have gone, against his personal will but in obedience to orders, to some sort of comfort that his pals would have prepared for him. I, however, had said, “You _can_ fall out.” It was permissive and left the falling out optional. But he saw before him an obviously eccentric and probably benevolent officer--and it was his job to be able to tell my batman where I lodged myself. Also, it was contrary to King’s Regulations for officers to go anywhere alone where there is any danger at all from shell or other fire. So, though he must have been uncommonly wet and hungry and tired, he followed me to the door of the house in whose dark windows I had seen the luminous patch--the forehead of Rosalie Prudent as she sat sewing, her head bent forward, in the twilight.
I don’t know how it is: but from the moment when I first saw that highlight--and it had been certainly three hours before--I had been perfectly sure that that was what it was--the forehead of a quiet woman bending her head forward to have more light from the high window whilst she sewed in the dusk. In a way it was not what one expected: the town had been evacuated of its civilian population the Sunday before, when the Huns--as it seemed, for the love of God--started shelling the church just as it had emptied after benediction. And they had shelled from six o’clock till midnight; and every night since then, from six o’clock till midnight they had shelled the church. And they were shelling it now--eighty yards away. It was a desolate, and it seemed a stupid business. But no doubt they had their purpose, though it was difficult to see what it was.
That was how Rosalie Prudent put it, as she sat sewing my wristbands by the stove, in the wash-house. I sat nearer the stove, naked to the waist, the red glow and the warmth that came from the red-hot iron of the circular furnace being, I can tell you, very agreeable to my shivering skin. Opposite me sat the orderly drinking a bottle of Burgundy--which he had richly deserved. The steam went up from his wet clothes and was tinged red by the light of the coke....
In the extremely clean _salle-à-manger_, with a high faïence stove of blue and white tiles, a colza lamp with a white globe, a buffet in the Nouvel Art style, of yellow Austrian oak with brass insertions; at a yellow oak table covered with a green velvet table-cover fringed with lace, sat my friend the Sinn Feiner learning the French that is spoken in Plugstreet from the niece, Beatrice Prudent. She was teaching him French by selling him handkerchiefs edged with lace in whose corners she had embroidered multicolored initials. In two very clean, lavender-papered bedrooms, upstairs, with white bedsteads, strips of carpet beside them on the waxed floors, with valises opened and showing works of devotion, altar vases, empty biscuit tins containing unconsecrated wafers of the sacrament, trench boots, gas helmets, tin hats--sat two padres composing their sermons for the next day. The Roman Catholic--for I heard him preach on it next day--was meditating on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. I don’t know what the Presbyterian was writing about.
But there the house was, large, quiet but for the shells, kept spotless by the labors of Rosalie and her niece Beatrice, and, as yet untouched--just as it had been evacuated by the factory manager and his family, who had fled on the Sunday after benediction. In one of the roomy, very tall parlors there was, over the fireplace, a gigantic figure of the Saviour, standing in robes of blue, white, and scarlet plaster of paris, holding on his left arm a great sheaf of white lilies and resting one hand on the head of a very thin plaster sheep of, I should think, a Rhineland breed. That was perhaps why the owner of the house had not trusted to its miraculous intervention in favor of his dwelling. He might have--for I heard the other day that the house remained intact until the 11/11/’18.
Rosalie profited--for, when the French inhabitants fled, the British authorities allowed Belgian refugees to take their places on condition that they billeted the troops. So perhaps it had been to protect her that the immense Bon Dieu waited! She deserved it.
She came from Plugstreet, of which town she had been one of the richest bourgeoises, her husband being the miller. She had had a large, roomy house, a great yard with stables and carts; she had had a wealthy, goodish, but possibly too jovial husband, two affectionate, dutiful, and industrious sons, and two obedient daughters. On Sundays she had gone to mass wearing a black satin gown, and, on her breast, a gold-framed cameo as large as a saucer. It represented a very classical Paris, seated, I don’t know why, apparently between the horns of a lyre and stretching out one hand--which no doubt contained the apple--toward three grouped Goddesses in rather respectable Flemish _déshabille_. Mme. Prudent retained this work of art, but her wardrobe was reduced to two blue cotton dresses.
I gathered all this, whilst I dozed by the black iron stove, from her conversation with the orderly. She spoke Flemish, and he, Wiltshire, but they understood each other. Of course, they used signs and facial expressions. The flames through the interstices of the stove poured upward to the dim rafters of the wash-house roof, and, by its light, Mme. Rosalie sewed as if she had no other pride and no other purpose in the world. For she told of the fate of her men and her womenfolk abstractedly and passionlessly; pride only showed itself when she talked of the state of the house in which she had found a refuge. From time to time she would say that if Mm. the Proprietors returned, they would find the floors waxed; the stair-rods shining, the windows polished; woodruff and sweet herbs amongst the bed linen in the presses, and not a speck of dust on the plaster-robes of the great Bon Dieu in the _salon de réception_. That was her pride....
As for the rest ... On the 18th of August, 1914, her man had been killed in the Belgian Reserve somewhere near Liège; on the 20th of the same month her eldest son had been killed in the Belgian regiment of the Guides. He had expected to have an excellent career in the office of an _avocat_--in Brûges, I think. On the 8th of November, 1914, her remaining son had been killed in the 76th French Regiment of Infantry of the Line. He had been chief clerk to an architect of Paris. Her daughters had been, one apprentice and the other chief saleswoman of a celebrated _couturière_ of Liège. She had heard of them once since the Germans had entered the city. A Belgian priest had written to her from the Isle of Wight in December, 1914, to say that some nuns had taken in Aimée and Félicité. Those were the names of her two daughters....
And at the moment she started up. She remembered that she had forgotten the potatoes for Monsieur--Monsieur being myself. So out she went into the black garden and returned with a tin platter of potatoes.
On it were ten tubers of which she weighed each in her hand inscribing what they came to on a slate--so that she might account to Messieurs the owners, on their return, for the potatoes that she had dug from the garden. Then she called her niece from the dining room to wash and slice the potatoes. She was going to give me an omelette with bacon and fried potatoes for my supper. She sat down again and went on, sewing and talking to the orderly.
She began talking of the interior of her house in Plugstreet; she described minutely all the furniture in all the apartments. In each of the bedrooms there was a night commode in mahogany and a statue of the Virgin, also one of the Blessed Saints, and a _prie-dieu_, also in mahogany.... And now there was nothing. Every fortnight she was permitted by the British military police to visit her house--and she stayed there, in Nieppe, so that every fortnight she might revisit her house--which now, she said, contained nothing. The shells were shaking it to pieces. The tiles were all gone; the rain was soaking into the upper floors. The furniture was all gone--the great presses with her linen, the wardrobes--_en acajou_--which had contained her black satin dress and her husband’s Sunday clothes....
But she continued to catalogue to the orderly the contents of her residence. I don’t know why it should interest him, but it did; for he nodded sagely when she talked of the _bahûts en bois de chêne_, and the immortels in vases on the piano....
Suddenly she turned her head to me and said to me, where I sat writing with my tablet on my knee:
“And I ask you, _M. l’officier_, for what purpose is it that one brings men children into the world if this is to be the end? They cause great pain in their entry, greater than at the entry of little girl children. It is difficult to keep them alive so that they reach men’s estate. And then it is difficult to keep them in the paths of virtue. And then they are gone.”
[Footnotes]
[10] This would mean that the Company presented, as a target to the German artillery, a solid and slow-moving cube of human flesh 240 ft. x 8 ft. x 6 ft. _No_ gunner could miss it.
[11] It is odd to think that Nieppe at that date was still supplied with electric power by underground cables that the Huns had not yet discovered, from Lille.
[12] His name was Private Partridge of, I think, the 6th Wilts.--a fine fellow, but not to be confused with Private Phillips of the 9th Welsh, who was my wonderfully good batman: (Note by Gringoire).
XII
_The Movies_[13]
I was a little bewildered when Mme. Prudent so addressed me. For, to tell the truth, I had not been listening to her very attentively. She seemed to accept the war--this war, states of war, any operations that washed and disintegrated the interiors of the world--she seemed to accept them so tacitly as being part of the child’s madness of the male that, in the warmth I had just dozed, not thinking much of her immense losses and not knowing at all that she would have anything very striking to say about the war. Besides, it was unusual to be beside a stove, under a roof.
And, when she had come in with the potatoes, out of the darkness, I had suddenly seen again that vision in green--of the sanctuary! And I remembered, extraordinarily, how once, years and years and years before, I had gone digging potatoes at night. I suppose some visitor had come to my cottage late. And I had put my hand into the ground to take out a potato, and I found the earth quite warm. The air cools off quicker than the sod, you see, after a hot day. It had astonished me then--and, in that house, the remembrance came again, vivid and astonishing, for it had produced exactly the effect of one’s having thrust one’s hand into the breast of a woman....
Well, I had been thinking of that and looking at that green landscape. And then, suddenly, I had pulled myself together. For it had occurred to me that I was not doing my duty. I had it in my head that I had got that soft, wet undangerous job of billeting, at the request of the bearded gentleman in the frock coat, who had sat under the picture by Bastien Lepage--or was it by Marie Bashkirtseff?--in front of the great table with the carnations and the miniature _Niké_. I daresay it was not the fact: or it may have been. There is no knowing. In France you were taken up, like a brown paper parcel, and deposited here or there at the behest of two obscure lines of smudged typewriting in some one’s Orders. And you did not know why; you had no will.
So I felt that I ought to be writing. It would not be fair to have a soft job for the purpose of wooing the Muse and then not to woo her. So I had pulled out from my wet tunic which hung over the chair back, my disreputable and sodden tablet of writing paper, which I had purchased two days before from that miserable Canteen Lance-Corporal and had begun, with a wet stump of pencil, to write the article called “_Une Partie de Cricket_” which, if only because it is a souvenir, I hope will be printed as an appendix to these remembrances. I know I wrote the first ten sentences, because I remember them and also because, the other day, I turned out the repulsive flap of my camp bed, and there, along with a damp sock and some mildewed straps, was the mouldering tablet with three scrawled pages....
But I couldn’t keep on writing. I was obsessed with the idea of a country, _patrie_, republic, body politic, call it what you will--that the recollection of that minister had called up in me. Yes: I had a vision of a country.
In the center was the Ministry--like the heart of an onion--and all the others that I had seen in the last week went round about it. Mind you, I have nothing to say against that Minister. I may have appeared to speak of him sardonically: that is a habit I have. But he, or something like him, was indispensable to the higher strategy of his nation:[14] and this man knew his job. What he wanted was perfectly the right thing: and if he did not know that the First Line Transport of a Battalion in the trenches was not exactly the happiest place in which to write lofty prose--well, it is certainly hypocrisy to seek, in the heart of the Sacred Emperor, for a knowledge of low tea-shops. He did not, obviously, like me but I have not the slightest doubt that I appeared drunk to him. Only a drunkard, really, would seek for ferrets in the palace of the Sacred Emperor. Yet I had my excuse. First of everything in the world--of everything in the whole world!--comes your battalion. And the ferrets of my battalion had all died suddenly; and the last thing they had said to me had been: Don’t forget to get us some ferrets. If you had seen the rats of Locre you would have understood.
But the Minister had not seen the rats of Locre so he had not understood....
No: he was a good man, in the right place. And very properly he sat amongst the gracious products of a State art--the pictures, the tapestries, the ormolu, the august building, the frescoes, the great staircases. And attendants who looked like bishops must be there to answer his bell; and Suisses with their great cocked hats and immense white gloves and their sabres with silver scabbards. There must be symbols of the Temporal Power of the State, which is august, ancient, and fit to be upheld. And, in disturbed times, there must be Civil Police in the courtyard, for strange visitors will come. And sentries there must be in the tricolored sentry-boxes beside the _porte-cochère_; sentries to call out the guard. And famous battalions must pass the door, along the boulevard, now and again.
And, round the Palace of the Sacred Emperor, there must be the Great City, and round the Great City must be La Grande Nation--stretching away and away, for miles and miles and miles....
It presented itself to me as twenty-seven hours of railway journey--past Etaples where I had spent, years before, long days in _châlets_ amongst the pine wood; past Calais where my grandfather was born; to Hazebrouck where, during the war, we had found the worst billiard table in the world and where, whilst we waited for a connection, a German plane was dropping bombs on the goods line and Cochin-Chinese in furred silk hoods were working as plate-layers. And so to Steenewerck, where the great farm carts and tilburies and berlins were mixed up with artillery horses, with timber wagons, with immense guns.
And so the land stretched out to Nieppe and the wash-house and Rosalie Prudent sewing in the light of the circular cast-iron stove that had become red hot. And on the stove there were bubbling the pots which contained supper for me and coffee for my friend the Sinn Feiner. And whilst Rosalie sewed, ever and again, the pots lifted themselves an inch off the dully red-hot disk and then sat down again. Shells, you see, were falling in the church.
So the land stretched out--yes, like a gramophone disk!--till it came to the wash-house that was intact amidst all the smashed houses with their forlorn lace window curtains. And all that edge of the disk was smashed houses inhabited by steadfast souls who sat sewing whilst the pots jumped on the hobs. They were the caretakers of _Messieurs les Propriétaires_ who had fled. There was a whole population of them: I came myself across a whole population of these quiet people, who considered only their duties to absent proprietors amongst the _rain_ of shells. I remember when I went to have lunch with the officers of our 2nd Battalion--all dead, the officers that I had lunch with!--in Albert, there sat and read the _Libre Parole_, such a very old caretaker. He had gray side-whiskers, a white apron, a yellow and black striped waistcoat, a square black alpaca cap or _bêret_--for all the world like an old domestic of a Paris nobleman’s hotel. He sat there, his legs crossed, his head thrown back, reading the paper, through silver-rimmed spectacles at the end of his nose. On the table beside him were a bullfinch in a gilt cage constructed like a pagoda and his black leather spectacle case. He had nothing to communicate about the war, except, I am glad to say, that the officers of the battalion were careful of the furniture, but he was so busy that he could not keep the floors as cleanly waxed as he desired. He asked me if I could not speak to Colonel Partridge about it. The Germans were putting in their usual lunch-time shells into that street; he was sitting reading in a glass-roofed passage between the kitchen and the _salle à manger_....
Yes: a host of such people came into my mind as I sat beside the stove. I am not going to talk about the war any more. By the grace of God, I will never talk about the war again whilst I live. As you say: the people who did not take part hate to be reminded of that part; and the people who did take part have had enough of it. Yes; you are right. I made the mistake of my life, professionally, _quand je m’en allais en guerre_. It got me disliked by the critics, and it is bad to be disliked by the critics--for a poet.[15] So you see, I too have my prudences.
And indeed I have my prudences--though they are not the prudences of other people. I do not desire money, glory, the praise of my kind whom I distrust, nor yet to dominate humanity, which is a beast that I dislike. I do not desire friends; I do not desire broad lands. So, thinking about things in the wash-house of Mme. Rosalie, I said: “I must dig myself in.” I said, indeed, twice: “I must dig myself in....”
I must have a dugout, as proof as possible against the shells launched against me by blind and august destiny; round about it there must be the strong barbed wire of solitude and, within the entanglements, space for a kitchen garden. Do you remember, Mr. Compiler, the redoubt our regiment made once--Montgomery’s Folly? There was the redoubt, a circular piece of engineering. Round about it there was a level space of fifty yards, to give a field of fire, surrounded by the apron of wire. And, in that level space, you remember, we made the Regimental Gardens.... Well, in the wash-house, I said to myself that, _appry la gair finny_, I must make for myself, in space and time, an affair like that, or as like it as possible. If I could afford a cottage, I would have a cottage: if not, any sort of shelter made of old tins filled with clay with a bit of corrugated iron for a roof, a door of sacking, a groundsheet for carpet. As for furniture, aren’t there bully-beef cases still?... _You_ remember!
Lord! the interiors we have constructed out of such materials and the fun we had. And how they vanished like a drift of leaves when we were drafted away. And how solid they seemed and work we did in them whilst they lasted, those interiors! So, I said to myself, in Mme. Rosalie’s wash-house, I shall get along somehow. And then, said I to myself: There is the question of food.
Well, there is gardening! As you know, I am not _le dernier venu_ when it comes to gardening. I will back myself to get twice as much off any given piece of ground as any ordinary man--if you will give me some seeds and a bit of old iron and a stick capable of being tied together into some semblance of a hoe....
So the war finished for me, looking at Mme. Rosalie as she sat entirely engrossed in her work whilst the shells made the pots jump alive off the red-hot iron plate.... The war was finished, since my line was taken for _appry la gair finny_. That we should win I had no doubt, for, though the horrible scalawags who wangle themselves into notoriety had too much to say in the world, our heart was in it, and the heart of the other side was not. I knew enough to know that. If God were good to one, for one’s self personally, it would finish there. I did not even want to stay to see the finish: I was so certain that we should win. But I had been worrying a little about myself. I couldn’t, you see, see anything but the workhouse for me, if I lived through. And, at my age, the workhouse is not a pleasant thought. I am just too old, and just too young for the workhouse.
But the spectacle of Madame Rosalie, fetching in the potatoes, saved me.... I will tell you an odd thing. I have spoken of the recumbent oval of green light that now and again had appeared to me, to turn into a picture of a green valley. I will confess that, hitherto, I had feared it. It had come into my head that it might be a symptom of a seizure, an epileptic fit perhaps, or of some obscure but disastrous nervous disease. _Ker vooly voo? Say la gair._ That region of the world had its trials for the nerves of people of my age. One might well be on the edge of something.
But looking at Mme. Rosalie--so extremely centered in the work in hand, so oblivious to the very real danger, so brave and so tranquil, I said to myself:
“What the devil! If she can stick it, I too can!”
For what had she to look forward to? She had said that, on the last occasion when the British authorities had permitted her to visit her house at Plugstreet they had not allowed her to enter it. The front wall of the upper part had fallen inward and for her sole possession she could see that on the wall of Félicité’s bedroom that was exposed to the sky, there hung a gilt-framed Souvenir of her daughter’s First Communion. Nothing else! Nothing! That was her sole possession in the world except for two gowns of blue Manchester goods and the cameo that represented the judgment of Paris....
And suddenly I was convinced that the apparition of that recumbent green oval was, not a visitation, but a sign. If from that time onward I just carried on, if I persevered--as I was truly minded to persevere, in my duties as a poor bloody footslogger--the Almighty would give to me at least sufficient space in the quiet earth that was just country--to dig myself in. Well, God has been good to me, as you see.
And, mind you, I consider and consider proudly, that I am doing, most of all, my duty to the State. I have always considered myself a member of the governing classes, with the privileges and the duties. And I abate nothing of that opinion. It seems to me to be my duty to govern, if not by directing, then at least by guiding, through the superiority of my insight. I am not fitted for the intrigues of what is called Public Life. No doubt that is no worse today than it was in the time of Alcibiades or the late Mr. Gladstone. But it is very bad; very vile.
You say: how do I presume to speculate on public matters who cut myself deliberately off from the consideration of public matters on the 8/9/’16? My friend, I have considered the public matters of the 8/9/1816; of the 4/9/1870; 1770; 1470; of the 8/9/’16 of B.C. 1070. And there is no difference. If it is not an hypocrisy, it remains still a very wearisome matter to search for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low teahouse. Well, I have done my share of searching and am too old for any more.
I have said that there is no difference between the public matters of today and those of the day of Alcibiades. But there is one very great difference: there is the difference that today--and it was never the case before--all the ground of the world that is capable of growing wheat is occupied by wheat and the population of the world is increasing by leaps and bounds. I will tell you: Some years before the war I was in a little town on the coast of France not far from Dunkirk. And my hotel was full of affrighted women; of nuns whose convents had been burned over their heads; and of ruined, wounded, and despairing men from the Low Countries. St. Quentin had been sacked; other towns were afire. A year before you could read in the papers the despatches of intrepid war correspondents in the South of France. They wrote from hotels--just as they did a year or so ago--how towns were flaming, streets running with wine, how the 5–9 shells soared and the naval howitzers raised their muzzles and coughed. You know the sort of thing!
Well! Those were the fingers on the wall. They were merely food-riots but they predicted Armageddon for those that can read--and still they predict an Armageddon beside which that in which we all took part was one of Gilbert White’s rush candles against the searchlights of a battleship. Those were food riots, caused by the determination of town dwellers to enforce prices on peasants. The last war was a food riot: the next war will be a food riot beyond the imagination of the sons of men.
Nothing can prevent it or much delay it unless there should come a change in the hearts of humanity. And I do not perceive much change in the hearts of man--and all the wheat-land of the world is occupied by wheat and the population of the world is increasing by leaps and bounds. _Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!_ You say that there are revolutions on foot. There always have been. But they have always been _révolutions de palais_ and _révolutions de palais_ they will always remain. What does it matter to me or to any sane man whether it is the Duke of Omnium or Mr. Evans of Llanfair-Rhaiado, or Mr. Hicks of Poplar who sits in the seats once occupied by Sir Robert Walpole or Mr. Jonkinsen or Colbert or Caius Julius Cæsar? None of those departed statesmen had to face the problem of a globe whose wheat-land was all occupied and whose population was increasing by leaps and bounds. In consequence they were not so greedy for money, or for the jazz bands of excitement that may make them forget tomorrow. For that is what it all comes to.
So I go out of public life of that type.
But don’t believe that I, Gringoire, Hippolyte, de l’Institut de France, go out of public life! No, I go into it. For I go to prove that a decent life, clean, contemplative, intent, skilful, and with its little luxuries, may yet be lived by the Gringoires of the world--_hominibus bonæ voluntatis_. For, though I am a poet, it is thus that I interpret the message of the angel. For it is thus that I see the world--as a world of a few Gringoires and of infinite millions that are the stuff to fill graveyards. I can’t see it any other way.
And I said to myself in the wash-house of Madame Rosalie whilst some fragments of iron and rubble pattered down on the tiles of the pent-roof from the nearby church that, for the rest of my life I would be what I will call self-supporting--at any rate after the war was finished--and I will govern!
For I will be dependent on the profits of no man’s labor, and I will produce more food than I eat and more thought than I take from the world. So, to the measure of the light vouchsafed, shall some fragment of the world be dependent on me. It is the only way to govern.
All this wangling for power in newspapers, meetings, market-places, and drawing-rooms is a weariness--and when you have it, what is it? A handful of dried leaves that crumble under the touch. If you have a platoon you can make it smart; if you have a garden, you may make it fine, luxuriant, producing marrows as large as barrels. Or if you write a poem, you must make it beautiful. Everything else is vanity.
I ... I who speak to you ... can house myself, clothe myself, discipline, entertain, and think for myself--and I can feed more than myself. As the old saying went: I can build a house, plant a tree, write a book, and beget a son. No man who cannot do all these things is fit to govern. He cannot govern--for I and the men who are with me, of good will, shall withhold his food, his clothing, his thoughts for his mind.
You may say, Mr. Compiler, that you who write falsehoods for the newspapers, who organize in offices the carrying of things on wheels, who dig in the bowels of the earth, and hammer on iron plates--or who take the profits of those who do these things--that you will govern, or inherit, the earth and the civilization of the earth. You cannot. If you withhold the labor of your hands or your minds--the world goes on. If I should--you would starve in body and soul--and in jazz noises!
In the end, I think, the world will be driven to become a great beehive: there will be the workers who think of nothing but their work. They will think nothing of the profits. And there will be the drones who provide the jazz noises and the wheels--and who will be killed off from time to time.
That is what I have gathered from the ruined houses in Flanders and from the aloof quality of the faces that came back to me whilst I sat dozing and Rosalie Prudent sewed. The faces were those of the Lincolnshire Private, of Lieutenant Morgan, of Henri Gaudier, and of the caretaker in the house at Albert--and of the Quartermaster of the Wiltshires.[16] But, so that you may not think that I limit myself to one class of society, I will add the faces of Lord Kitchener, of Sir Edward Grey, and of the French Minister, whose name I have forgotten. I did not need to see in imagination the faces of the orderly or of Mme. Rosalie, for they were with me.
You will object that I single out for salvation in Gomorrah only those of whom I have talked. Certainly, it is only those that I single out--those of that type, for those, for me, are the _homines bonæ voluntatis_ who must be preserved if the State is to continue. They have rather abstracted expressions since they think only of their work; they have aspects of fatigue, since the salvation of a world is a large order, and they bear on their backs the burden of the whole world; but they look at you directly, and in their glance is no expression of pride, ambition, profit, or renown. They have expressions of responsibility, for they are the governing classes. Others will have that title in the newspapers--but they govern only those who make the noises of jazz-bands. The food supply and the supply of poetry is in the hands of the Gringoires.
Buzzing noises make the world pleasant; it would be a grim and silent world without them. I should not like it, nor would the other Gringoires like it. It was in Coventry Street that I last met Lieutenant Morgan-Gringoire. But, from time to time the buzzers must be killed off. Destiny is remorseless: either those who buzz must die in occasional crowds or those who live to give food and poetry must go starve and the others with them. Destiny is remorseless.
But destiny is also just. The drones of the hive have a good time--and give a good time. Moreover they make splendid soldiers of the type of the Cockney or the Parigot. That, perhaps, is how destiny means them to get killed off. So they will have their good times; and they will also have glory, the glory of finding the person of the Sacred Emperor in some such low teahouse as was the Bois de Mametz on the 14/7/’16 when the 38th Division was murdered.
And maybe that is the best glory of all. God forbid that I should say it is not. And I like to think that, along with the good time that they had and the glory of standing in the presence of the Sacred Emperor, they found also--sanctuary. For I like very much to remember the smile that was on the face of Lt. Morgan when they dug him out from under the dirt of the communication-trench.
Do you remember the old Catholic idea that a man may find salvation between the saddle and the ground? Well, we know little of death--nothing of death. So I hope it is not a heresy to think that, as the eyelids of those who fell closed on their glory, they had long, long visions, like that green vision that came to me from time to time. For time is a very relative thing; and may they not well have had long, long illusions, seeming to last for years and years?--to the effect that they had found, each his imagined sanctuary, where there was the gingerbread cottage that, hand in hand, on tiptoe with some Gretel, they explored, crossing their fingers and crying “_Feignits_” in the face of destiny--and where the Hou-Hou-oo of the wolf upon the Montagne Noire shall sound so very distantly as to be only the comforting reminder of the Grimm we knew as children.
----Something like that.
That is all I have to say about the war, here and now. But you have poked your sardonic fun at me from time to time, Mr. Compiler, and though bargaining is no part of my nature, a determination to have my own way was born in me as pawkiness was in you. And now, I say this:
“You have poked your fun at me as writer and as cook, and decorated with only those attributions of yours--as if each of those little, half-concealed smiles were a rag and tatter on my shining-seated _pantalons_, you propose to exhibit me to your public. Well, you shan’t except on my own terms. The first is that, as you have spoken of me as writer you should enshrine--like a shining fly in amber--in the gum of your lucubrations a specimen of my own writing as it came to me, precisely, in Nieppe. And the second is that, since you began this compilation with what purports to be an account of my entertainment of the guests who honor this lowly roof of ours, you shall, as truthfully entertain your readers--as truthfully as you can, for God gives to some of us vision and to some the gift of recounting things askew for the entertainment of those wider of mouth than of intelligence--you shall then entertain your readers with an account of the dishes which since early morning I have been preparing for the evening degustation of yourself, of my dear Sélysette and your friend Mrs. Carmody. For I observe that, though you poke fun at my hospitality you are not averse from begging your dimity madams to share what you have called, I think, our rough oaken board.”
Mrs. Carmody was no more than the wife of the Headmaster of the King Edward VI Grammar School where your Compiler gives lessons in the English language and drill, in the neighboring town. She had expressed an urgent curiosity to witness the domestic felicities and the supposedly eccentric habits of my friends. For it is not to be imagined that a figure so marked as that of our poet could conceal itself in an isolated dingle of a Home County without setting a considerable part of that county agog with curiosity--any more than it is to be imagined that an usher in a diminutive but immensely ancient public school could forever stave off from contact with his most intimate friends the young and agreeable but still imperious wife of his Head.
But to the alarmed, but only half-expressed remonstrances of your Compiler--for what, he wondered would Gringoire insist on inserting into his pages; and wouldn’t his patiently prosecuted work when, if ever, it saw the light, wouldn’t it have the aspect of a mere rag-bag? To these alarmed, if only half-expressed remonstrances, Gringoire, arising to his lean, gray height, announced his immutable programme for the day. It was by then towards four of a very hot, but fast cooling, July afternoon. The sunflowers drooped on their stalks, flycatchers made their curious, interrupted flights into the shining air and back to the old roof. The cows from the meadow had crowded to the other side of the quickset hedge, and, rubbing themselves unceasingly to get rid of flies from their backs made a curious sound like the tearing of thin paper interspersed with the deep, tranquil sighings of their breaths. It was in short an English July afternoon--a time when, if ever, men should sit and ruminate in quiet.
But there was such a clamor! You would have said that the itch of all the authors and all the regimental sergeants major had entered into our friend. Quick, the boy, dozing behind the house, must put in the mare and go to the station and see if the Bombay duck had come for the curry. Quick, the maid must bring tea half an hour before that diminutive creature was accustomed to bring it. Or, no.... She must put back tea an hour and Madame Sélysette must with her own incomparable fingers blow three quarts of shandygaff and not forget the lime-juice. And Madame Sélysette must find the article he had written at Nieppe, and must put out paper and pens and cut two quills just as he liked them and come down and entertain Compi--your humble servant the compiler--and see that no wasps had got under the cabbage-leaves that covered the syllabubs in the spring and see that the boy did not take the traces up two holes too short and ...
Madame Sélysette put her charming and provocative bust out of the little square window space above and to the left of the porch.
“You propose to write, my friend?” she asked. “But you swore this morning that you would send me to Coventry for a week if I did not goad you into picking the greengages....”
Gringoire made a sound like “Grrh”, as if the Wolf of the Mountains had humorously snarled. He said:
“You have no soul!” She made at him a little grimace and disappeared. But I could hear their endearments as they met on the sounding little wooden stairs and felt all the summer regrets of the nearly old bachelor.
There was however no rest that afternoon. It was well to have the great blue three-quart jug of shandygaff on the seat in the porch; it was agreeable to have Madame Sélysette to one’s self whilst she dotted a few of the ‘i’s’ and crossed the ‘t’s’ as to the entangled career and theories of her great man--and there is no better drink of an English July afternoon than shandygaff that has a little edge of lime-juice given to it and that since dawn has had all its ingredients cooled in an ice-cold spring. And there is no pleasanter topic in the mouth of a gay and tranquil young woman assured of the adoration of her mate than her expressions of her humorous adoration for Himself and his crotchets. You reply that the adoration of a lively young woman expressed to yourself would be more agreeable, but that is not the case. For lively young women do not express adoration to the faces of their males; but, failing and replacing that, it is pleasant to sit in a porch and hearken to adoration of a roaring genius overhead. For it causes you to have daydreams of a time when you in revenge may sit in an upper room, with a lively young woman expressing to a third the adoration that she feels for yourself....
But continuously our Gringoire’s voice rumbled from inside his upper room. Then coming to the window he would shout:
“Sélysette Sé ... ly ... _sette_.... What is the colloquial English for ...” Some phrase that I did not catch. Or:
“Sé ... ly ... sette.... _Est-ce que_ ...” And again something that I did not catch for my French is none of the strongest. But I should gather that it had something to do with his pots that were on the stove in the disreputable shanty that he called his cookhouse. For Madame would enter that erection like Eurydice disappearing into Orcus. Immediately would come the thunder of Gringoire descending the stairs as if he had fallen. He too would enter the cookhouse and there would be the sound of impassioned and farcical altercations. Then Gringoire would approach the porch with a face that resembled a beet root with the heat. He would drink a pint of shandygaff at a swallow, exclaim:
“The stuff’s bilge.... No, I don’t mean the shandygaff. There is no one like Sélysette for compounding cold drinks. I trained her. I mean my prose. My prose is bilge....” And he would thunder up the stairs whilst Madame tranquilly resumed her place.
Once she asked some questions about Mrs. Carmody and when I said that lady had the greatest possible admiration for Gringoire and even had some of his verses by heart she expressed amused relief. “For,” said she, “there are going to be great storms and dinner won’t be ready till ten.”
It wasn’t.
For, you understand, in the sometimes tranquil, sometimes tempestuous but always complex nature of my friend, the pride of authorship had for the moment come uppermost and he was determined to get _his_ prose into his compiler’s volume. But of late he had only written in French as he has told you. So he would come to the window and shout to me the question whether he would be allowed to insert his French prose. Without waiting for me to answer his question he would shout: “No, of course you won’t!” and disappear. Then he would shout:
“But I can’t translate my own damned stuff. In heaven’s name what’s the English for ... The beastly colloquial English....”
Towards seven, just when I was thinking that I must go and tidy myself for the approach of Mrs. Carmody, he appeared before me, dishevelled and with a mess of written papers dangling from his hands.
“Here, you,” he exclaimed, “get your reporter’s notebook and come with me!”
And, at the bottom of the garden, under the hedge beneath the damson trees he made me lie down in the grass which was there long and began to dictate to me. He couldn’t, as he said, translate his own French prose because his own French was near his heart and his English much less. You might say that his passions were for English countrysides and for French prose and here the two met to his confusion. Perhaps it is impossible to interpret French prose in the long grass beneath an English quickset hedge.
In any case Gringoire was distracted as he dictated and I was distracted, using a shorthand that I almost never employ to take down his words that he whispered or shouted or intermingled with ejaculations that I was not intended to record.... And I was the more distracted because at the top of the garden I could see Mrs. Carmody and Madame Sélysette carrying implements and provisions for the dinner from the house door to the little platform beneath the enormous oak that overshadowed the spring. Those gay young things laughed over their burdens--for Mrs. Carmody, out of her School House, was at least as gay as Madame Sélysette. And every time that they laughed Gringoire, lying in the long grass, groaned and writhed with the whole of his immense length. I have relegated his French, for which he gave me the copy from some Swiss magazine, to an appendix. I can only hope that his French is better than his English version of it. But as to that I am no judge. I only wish that he had not insisted on my presenting an untidy book to the world, for in common, I believe, with most readers, I much dislike appendices. For when on a bookstall I see a book and, examining it, find appendices at the end, I think either that that is a learned work for which I am seldom in the mood, having studies enough of my own to pursue, or that the author is an untidy-minded fellow who has not given himself the pains to digest and put into his own phraseology matter that will almost certainly be tedious to read.
But in this case I have no alternative. The rages of Gringoire are things that I have no mind to face. Print his lucubrations I must or there would be the devil to pay. I am not certain that there won’t be at least a minor fiend to propitiate as it is--I mean when Gringoire comes to look for his prose and finds it at the end of the volume.
There certainly was a tremendous row when he discovered that he had kept the ladies waiting. He howled with rage, sprang to his feet, rushed into his cookhouse....
And the first view that Mrs. Carmody had of a poet for whom, as you shall discover, she had a real veneration, was rushing along the face of the house towards the dinner-table beneath the oak. He was hatless, coatless, his shirt-collar was widely unbuttoned and he was bearing a huge tray covered with little saucersful of the piquant messes that he calls _hors d’œuvres_.
We dined.
I am, alas, no Brillat Savarin and Gringoire as cook is to say the least inarticulate. When he is not that he is profane. We had his _hors d’œuvres_. Then we had his curried lobster. What shall I say about his curry?
Do you know the sensation of suddenly leaving the level and swooping downwards on the little railways you get at Exhibitions or in fairgrounds? It is like that. You take your first forkful of one of Gringoire’s inventions with misgivings mingled with anticipations. Then you are reassured. You say:
“This is at least supportable. I shall survive this.”
You take a sip of his white wine. After that it flies.
But you can’t _believe_ in Gringoire as cook.... I sometimes wonder if even he believes in himself. I mean, I asked him the other day for the recipe for his curry, just as, at the beginning of this book, as I have reported, I tried to extract from him his directions for household management. The results were even more inarticulate. He said:
“Oh, you take any old thing--tinned lobster, bully beef, cold mutton.... And of course you fry ... But curry powder is good for any dish.... Because of the garlic in it.... And which curry are you talking about? There are hundreds. The only thing that unites them is that the curry must be cooked. Don’t you understand? The curry--the powder--itself must be cooked. For hours and hours. Do you see? No, you don’t see. How can I remember what I put into the curry for your friend? Any old thing....”
I know he hadn’t put in any old thing, though it is probably true that the chief ingredient of his dish is his fine frenzy. But I remember the energy he had put into securing the fresh lobsters for that particular effort--and the special brand of French preserved oysters that he had had to have for his beefsteak, kidney and oyster pudding which on that menu followed the curry. The boy had been sent on a bicycle in one direction, Madame Sélysette and I in the dogcart to Ulpeston, he himself had borrowed a lift in the baker’s cart and gone to Storrinton.... No, surely, not any old thing--though he surely believed what he said....
At any rate towards eleven we were contented and he, appeased, sat back in his chair and talked about poultry foods to Mrs. Carmody, that being the first time that he had paid her any attention.
The great boughs of the oak in which there now hung three Chinese lanthorns--Madame Sélysette loves Chinese lanthorns--the great boughs of the oak towered quietly up towards the planets, great white moths appearing and disappearing again into the blackness around the glow of the lanthorns. The Dog-star hung low on the horizon before us and the owls called at ten-yard intervals as they flew along the little stream in the meadow. When they were silent the night-jar churned intermittently. When we too were silent the little tinkle of the stream from the spring made itself heard.
I think that Mrs. Carmody did not much want to talk about poultry though her white Leghorns had taken many prizes at County or even more important shows. I think she let the conversation drag purposely. For suddenly, when we had all been pensive for a minute or two, her voice said from the shadows:
“‘I should like to imagine a night...!’”
Gringoire exclaimed sharply:
“What? What’s that? Don’t!”
But Mrs. Carmody said defiantly:
“I will. Just to pay you.... To show you....” And she began again:
“‘I should like to imagine A moonlight in which there would be no machine guns! For it is possible To come out of a trench or a hut or a tent or a church all in ruins; To see the black perspective of long avenues All silent; The white strips of sky At the sides, cut by the poplar trunks; The white strips of sky Above, diminishing-- The silence and blackness of the avenue Enclosed by immensities of space Spreading away Over No Man’s Land....
For a minute ... For ten.... There will be no star-shells But the light of the untroubled stars; There will be no Verey light, But the light of the quiet moon Like a swan. And silence!...’”
The moon was at that moment just tipping over the ridge of trees before us. Mrs. Carmody hesitated.
“‘Then ... a long way ...’”
The voice of Madame Sélysette said slowly:
“‘Then far away to the right ...’”
Mrs. Carmody said: “Thank you!” and continued:
“‘Then far away to the right thro’ the moonbeams _Wukka Wukka_ will go the machine guns, And, far away to the left _Wukka Wukka_ And sharply _Wuk_ ... _Wuk_ ... and then silence For a space in the clear of the moon.’”
The impassive face of Gringoire that the moonlight just showed worked suddenly, the mouth just moving--oh, rather like a rabbit munching. He said:
“I wrote that in Nieppe in September ’sixteen....” He added:
“And it’s pleasant ... you two remembering....”
He reached out his right hand and took Mrs. Carmody’s left, and his left and took Madame Sélysette’s right.
“‘Rest,’” he said with his heavy tired voice, “‘after toil, port after stormy seas ...’” He paused and added after a moment: “‘Do greatly please!’”
[Footnotes]
[13] Gringoire particularly asks me to style this chapter as above because the Eminent Reformer, mentioned in Part I, Chapter VI, once said that the Writing on the Wall at Belshazzar’s Feast was the first recorded instance of a Kinematographic production. It seems stupid: but our friend insists. He also asks me to say that Mme. Prudent’s name was really _Dutoit_.
[14] It should be remembered that the military description of “tactics” is the direction of troops when in contact with the enemy. “Strategy” includes the direction of all movements that take place outside the immediate firing line. The conversion of neutral nations into allies or the cementing of bonds between allies by literary manifestations is specifically and according to the textbooks a branch of strategy, so that Gringoire is using the correct military word.
[15] As far as the compiler has been able to discover, the poet’s only ground for this diatribe is a review that his last volume of poems received from the ---- Literary Supplement. In this the reviewer devotes one line to saying that the volume of poems is the best that was published during the war and the rest to personal abuse of our friend--and that is all. Our friend says that this is not cricket. It probably is not; but one should never say so.
[16] _Note by Gringoire._ I do not know why I am haunted by the remembrance of this man. He was killed by the direct hit of a shell. When I last saw him, he was reading a paper with the spectacles at the end of his nose like the caretaker at Albert. His tunic--with ten ribbons!--was open over his fat stomach, and he wore carpet slippers. He was as brave as a lion and as simple as a sheep: no soul then alive knew his job better. He was a butcher of Stratford-on-Avon. If he have left a young son, may the shade of the Divine William guide that young son’s footsteps gently and humorously through the ways of life!
ENVOI
UNE PARTIE DE CRICKET
BEING A LETTER WRITTEN FROM THE LINES OF SUPPORT TO CAPITAINE UN TEL AT PARIS.
Mon cher Monsieur, Camarade et Confrère,
C’était derrière le bois de Bécourt, un soir de juillet, et nous étions en train de jouer au cricket tandis que les obus allemands passaient au-dessus de nos têtes. Les obus allemands arrivaient, semblant vouloir crier le mot anglais _weary_,--qui veut dire fatigué,--puis changeant d’avis, ils disaient--et péremptoirement--_whack_. Mais en jouant au cricket, on oublie l’orchestre boche: on n’entend plus les obus qui passent. Nous courions; nous adressions des objurgations au malheureux qui n’attrapait pas la balle; nous discutions même, parce que les règles du jeu de cricket--qu’on joue avec une balle de tennis, deux marteaux et deux caisses de _bully-beef_--sont un peu élastiques. La pelouse est d’argile, dure et cuite par le soleil presque tropical; en fait d’herbe nous n’avons que des chardons, pour spectateurs et pour barrières à la fois, les mulets de transport, alignés. Mais jamais le cricket international qu’on joue sur le terrain des Lords, dans le bois de Saint-Jean, n’a été si accidenté ni si émouvant que notre partie de cricket derrière le bois de Bécourt, ce soir de juillet. Nous avons crié, gesticulé, discuté, hurlé ... nous, les officiers anglais, mornes, taciturnes!
Je vous présente ces considérations en forme de lettre, mon cher ... j’aurais voulu plutôt écrire un essai, soigné, balancé, bien pensant. Mais il m’est impossible de ciseler de la prose ces jours-ci. “Que voulez-vous,”--comme disent nos Tommies,--“c’est la guerre!” J’ai passé vingt-cinq ans à chercher des cadences, à chasser des assonances, avec une rage acharnée, comme celle du bon père Flaubert. Mais aujourd’hui je n’écris que des lettres,--longues, diffuses, banales. L’autre affaire demande trop de temps, de loisir,--de chance!
Donc, nous étions en train de jouer au cricket, quand je vis passer tout près de nous un officier français de ma connaissance,--officier d’une de ces batteries de 75, admirables, et que, la nuit surtout, nous avons trouvées tellement réconfortantes, à cause de leur voix qui roulait sans cesse, à peu de mètres derrière notre dos. C’était un colosse gris-bleu, aux yeux bruns et sombres, à la moustache brune et lourde. Il restait là, campé sur ses jambes et sur sa canne, comme quelque instrument de guerre à trois jambes, silencieux et d’acier. Et quand je m’approchai de lui, il me dit:
--_I find that a little shocking. Very shocking!_ (Je trouve ça un peu shocking. Même très shocking.)
Il regardait les joueurs de cricket qui continuaient à crier, à gesticuler et à courir entre les chardons gigantesques et les jambes des mulets dangereux. Je m’écriai:
--Au nom du bon Dieu, pourquoi?
Il ne cessait pas de regarder les joueurs, et réfléchit longtemps avant de répondre. Et ce fut moi qui, m’impatientant, commençai à parler, et même à gesticuler. Je disais que nous étions nouvellement sortis des tranchées; que le jeu donnait la santé, remettait le moral, faisait oublier la guerre ... que sais-je? Il réfléchissait toujours, et moi je parlais toujours. Puis enfin, il dit:
--_I find that this war should be a religion. On coming out the trenches one should sit--and reflect. Perhaps one should pray_ ... (Je trouve que cette guerre devrait être conduite en religion. En sortant des tranchées l’on devrait s’asseoir--et réfléchir. Peut-être devrait-on prier.)
Et puis ... je parlai encore longuement sans qu’il répondît autre chose que:
--_I find that, all the same._
Alors j’éclatai de rire. Car la situation me semblait tout d’un coup allégorique. Et si vous y pensez, mon cher, vous verrez pourquoi je riais. C’est parce que c’était lui, le représentant de Cyrano de Bergerac, qui parlait l’anglais et employait les monosyllabes d’un lord Kitchener de théâtre; tandis que moi, le représentant de tant de milords et officiers qui pendant tant de siècles n’ont rien trouvé de plus à dire que les deux syllabes “O ... ah”,--moi, qui aurais dû porter monocle et favoris jaunes, j’étais occupé à hurler et à mimer des phrases d’un français assez incohérent, comme un vrai Tartarin. Et tous les autres--officiers et O. R.--de mon régiment continuaient à sauter, à crier et à rire comme des enfants méridionaux.
* * * * *
Et, en vérité, le changement est étonnant et quelque peu émouvant. Nous avons toujours eu l’idée--tout le monde, même le Français a eu l’idée--que le peuple français, et surtout les officiers et soldats français étaient gais, débonnaires, loquaces, goguenards,--“bretteurs et hâbleurs sans vergogne.” Eh bien, j’ai voyagé en permission de Steenewerck à Paris,--voyage qui dura dix-sept heures. Et, pendant ces dix-sept heures, quoiqu’il y eût toujours des officiers français assis dans les voitures, ou debout dans les couloirs du train, le voyage a été le plus silencieux que j’aie fait de ma vie. Personne ne parlait. Mais personne! Il y avait des colonels, des commandants, des capitaines. Et je ne puis croire que ce fût tout à fait de ma faute. Il est vrai que, partout dans le train, on lisait: “Taisez-vous; méfiez-vous”,--et le reste. Mais c’eût été impossible que _tous_ ces messieurs gris-bleus m’eussent attribué les oreilles ennemies dont parle l’affiche. Je portais l’uniforme khaki.
Non, certainement, le voyage n’a pas été accidenté. Je vais vous en raconter les incidents: de Hazebrouck à Calais cinq officiers français, qui n’échangèrent pas deux mots; de Calais à Abbeville, trente officiers. Je m’adressai à un capitaine d’artillerie, en grognant que le train marchait très lentement. Il me répondit en anglais:
--_Many troops moving!_
Et puis, silence!
A Amiens entre un monsieur en civil. C’était un samedi vers huit heures du matin, et le train avait l’air de ne vouloir arriver à Paris qu’après trois heures de l’après-midi. Comme j’avais des affaires à Paris et que je devais partir le lundi avant six heures, je demandai à ce monsieur si je trouverais les banques fermées, et les ministères, et les magasins. Il me répondit qu’il n’en savait rien, qu’il n’était pas chez lui à Paris. Il allait à Jersey pour prendre possession du corps d’une jeune fille qui, ayant été noyée à Dieppe, avait flotté jusqu’à Jersey. _Et lui aussi me répondit en anglais._
Il commençait à pleurer tout doucement.
Et puis ... silence; les officiers regardaient ce monsieur avec des yeux qui ne disaient rien. Mais ce n’était pas gai!
A Creil montent deux dames, jolies et bien mises. Elles ont assez parlé, ces deux-là. Croix-Rouge, œuvres de charité, colonels, familles! Mais les officiers ne les regardaient jamais. Pas un ne levait les yeux, quoiqu’elles fussent jeunes, jolies, bien mises....
Tandis que, pendant le trajet de Rouen à Albert, nous autres--qui n’allions pas en permission!--nous avons chanté, parlé aux demoiselles qu’on voyait sur les perrons; joué au football le long du train; grimpé sur le toit des voitures.
J’exagère un peu, naturellement, ces différences. Ce n’est pas un article que je suis en train d’écrire, c’est une lettre. Mais je reconte quand même ce que mes yeux ont vu et mes oreilles entendu.... Et comment l’expliquer? Parce que ce n’est pas assez de dire--comme on me l’a dit assez souvent--que si, en Angleterre, les Allemands étaient établis entre York et Manchester, s’ils avaient saisi les industries, pillé les villes,--et fait ce que font les Boches!--nous aussi, nous serions tristes, mornes, silencieux. Je ne parle pas de la population civile de mon pays; je parle de gens dont la vie n’est pas gaie, qui sont expatriés, loin de leur patrie, et qui souffrent, je vous l’assure, d’une nostalgie très sincère. Car là-bas, sur la Somme ou en Belgique, l’on se sent bien oublié, bien abandonné, et très, très isolé, d’un isolement semblable à l’isolement de ... Eh bien! c’est comme si l’on était suspendu--nous, quelques millions d’hommes!--sur un tapis, dans les infinitudes de l’espace. Les routes qui s’étendent devant nous cessent tout d’un coup, à quelques mètres, dans le _No Man’s Land_. Et c’est bien triste à contempler, des grand’routes qui cessent tout d’un coup. Et puis les sentiers par lesquels on est venu--et qui s’étendent entre soi et son pays--sont des chemins que l’on ne doit pas traverser.... Et, tout comme un autre, l’on aime sa femme, sa maison, ses enfants, ses parents, son coin du feu, ses champs, ses fumiers, ses bœufs et ses bois.... Le soldat français a cela, au moins, qu’il se bat chez soi! Et c’est quelque chose pour lui, comme individu.
Je suppose que c’est pour oublier, non seulement les obus allemands, mais aussi celles qui nous sont si chères, le coin du feu où nous avons si souvent devisé, les champs, les fumiers, les bœufs et les bois,--c’est pour trouver “l’herbe qui s’appelle l’oubli”, que nous jouons au cricket près de Bécourt, et sortons des tranchées en donnant des coups de pied à un football qui saute à travers les corps des hommes tombés, vers les Allemands. Est-ce faiblesse? Est-ce la source dont nous tirons ce que nous avons de fermeté, de hardiesse, de courage? Je n’en sais rien.
Aussi bien que moi, mon cher, vous avez connu la difficulté de définir exactement et en termes justes les différences, les nuances des différences, qu’il y a entre des nations. Nous commençons par développer une théorie--et nous théorisons beaucoup trop tôt; ou bien nous prenons le contre-pied d’une théorie admise depuis des siècles. Nous avons eu en Angleterre les caricatures du dix-neuvième siècle, des guerres de Napoléon I^{er}, qui nous montraient le Français selon l’imagination populaire anglaise. C’était un coiffeur, mince et affamé, qui ne mangeait que des grenouilles. Et vous autres, vous aviez votre John Bull, gros comme un bœuf, le ventre grand comme le ventre d’un bœuf, et qui dévorait des bœufs entiers. Ou vous aviez le milord qui se suicidait par pur spleen. Elles étaient stupides, ces caricatures, mais il m’est impossible de croire qu’elles ne fussent pas sincères. Les Anglais qui s’étaient battus en France en 1815 avaient cherché ce qu’ils voyaient--mais ils l’avaient vu. De même pour les Français.
De même, peut-être, pour moi. J’étais venu d’une Angleterre émotionnée, couverte, de l’île d’Anglesey jusqu’à North Foreland, d’affiches patriotiques et coloriées, et puis, de la frontière belge jusqu’à Paris, j’ai vu une France sans affiches, grise, silencieuse, préoccupée. Mais pour moi il n’y avait rien de neuf à trouver la France préoccupée--parce que, pour moi, la France a toujours été la France des champs, des villages, des bois et des paysans. Et la France des paysans est une France bien laborieuse, qui travaille sans cesse entre bois et étangs ou sous les oliviers du Midi.
Et pour moi la population anglaise a toujours été un peuple des villes. Or, ce sont les habitants des grandes-villes qui, tout en travaillant aussi bien que vous voudrez, ont besoin de faire de temps en temps la noce--chacun selon sa nature. Et c’est peut-être là la raison--la _causa causans_--des différences entre l’armée française et nous autres. L’armée anglaise est une armée ouvrière, l’armée française est une armée plutôt paysanne. Des paysans, et surtout des paysans français, ont l’habitude de mesurer les sévérités, les nécessités implacables de la nature. Ils les confrontent sans cesse, pendant des semaines, des mois, des années. Ils ne peuvent y échapper,--ils ne peuvent pas s’évader de la contemplation des maux de la vie, des vents et des vers qui détruisent les récoltes, en prenant des jours de permission, en faisant des calembours, ou par cet “humour” âcre et plutôt triste qui est, peut-être, la qualité souveraine du Tommy anglais. Car inscrire sur un obus qu’on va lancer contre les Boches les mots “_Love to little Willie_” peut paraître stupide, shocking à des gens qui n’ont jamais été là-bas. Mais la psychologie humaine est très compliquée, et il est certain que la lecture d’inscriptions de ce genre sur les grands obus à côté desquels on passe le long des chaussées a beaucoup fait pour nous encourager quand nous avons avancé d’Albert vers La Boisselle. Pourquoi? C’est difficile à dire. C’est peut-être parce que, les obus étant terribles et funestes, voici un obus qui est devenu ridicule, joyeux, ou même humain. Car nous sommes tous anthropomorphistes--et qu’un seul obus puisse se commettre à être le véhicule d’un jeu d’esprit, cela suffit pour donner à des coeurs superstitieux l’idée que tous les obus peuvent être un peu moins surhumains qu’ils n’en ont l’air. Car on a peur des obus. Ce sont les messagers des dieux qui ont soif, qui se manifestent en sifflant, qui disent qu’ils sont fatigués, mais qui détruisent, en deux minutes, des villages, des fumiers, des champs entiers. De même pour la partie de cricket que nous avons jouée parmi des chardons couverts de poussière et qui cachaient les ossements des soldats tombés. C’était peut-être sacrilège, peut-être stupide.
Mais je vous assure, mon cher, que ce paysage de Bécourt, Fricourt, Mametz n’était pas joyeux. C’était en juillet, et le soleil laissait tomber ses rayons sur les vallées larges, sur la poussière qui montait au ciel, sur les pentes, sur les bois noirs. Mais cette terre ne riait pas! Elle s’étendait loin, loin; et sous l’horizon bleu-gris se trouvaient les terrains auxquels personne ne voulait penser. Non, la nature, là, semblait terrible et funeste--territoire où le Destin aveugle et implacable devait se manifester à des millions d’êtres. Et puis nous y avons joué au cricket--et tout de suite ce paysage funeste et surhumain est devenu ... est devenu un champ de cricket!
Pour un intellectuel, un terrain restera un terrain, qu’on y voie en l’air des bombes, des obus ou une balle de tennis. Mais pour nous autres, un terrain où nous avons joué au cricket devient moins terrible, et nous y passerons nos jours avec plus de contentement, malgré les ossements des tombés qui se cachent sous la poussière des chardons énormes. C’est stupide, c’est sacrilège, si vous voulez. Mais nous sommes ainsi faits, nous autres qui sortons des grandes villes pour faire la guerre. Moi, je suis comme cela, j’ai senti comme cela, là-bas, derrière le bois de Bécourt, par un soir de juillet 1916.
Et je reste toujours votre affectionné, G.
P.S. Et je vous prie de remarquer que toutes les personnes que j’ai rencontrées entre Steenewerck et Paris parlaient l’anglais. C’est déjà quelque chose.
THE END