Chapter 5

Bones lead up to the desert, bones are scattered about it, it is the most menacing and calamitous waste of all the deadly places that have been inclement to man. It flatters the Hohenzollerns with visions of victory now because they are doomed by it and are about to die. When their race has died the earth shall smile again, for their deadly mirage shall oppress us no more. The cities shall rise again and the farms come back; hedgerows and orchards shall be seen again; the woods shall slowly lift their heads from the dust; and gardens shall come again where the desert was, to bloom in happier ages that forget the Hohenzollerns.

A Famous Man

Last winter a famous figure walked in Behagnies. Soldiers came to see him from their billets all down the Arras road, from Ervillers and from Sapigny, and from the ghosts of villages back from the road, places that once were villages but are only names now. They would walk three or four miles, those who could not get lorries, for his was one of those names that all men know, not such a name as a soldier or poet may win, but a name that all men know. They used to go there at evening.

Four miles away on the left as you went from Ervillers, the guns mumbled over the hills, low hills over which the Verys from the trenches put up their heads and peered around,--greeny, yellowy heads that turned the sky sickly, and the clouds lit up and went grey again all the night long. As you got near to Behagnies you lost sight of the Verys, but the guns mumbled on. A silly little train used to run on one’s left, which used to whistle loudly, as though it asked to be shelled, but I never saw a shell coming its way; perhaps it knew that the German gunners could not calculate how slow it went. It crossed the road as you got down to Behagnies.

You passed the graves of two or three German soldiers with their names on white wooden crosses,--men killed in 1914; and then a little cemetery of a French cavalry regiment, where a big cross stood in the middle with a wreath and a tricolor badge, and the names of the men. And then one saw trees. That was always a wonder, whether one saw their dark shapes in the evening, or whether one saw them by day, and knew from the look of their leaves whether autumn had come yet, or gone. In winter at evening one just saw the black bulk of them, but that was no less marvellous than seeing them green in summer; trees by the side of the Arras-Bapaume road, trees in mid-desert in the awful region of Somme. There were not many of them, just a cluster, fewer than the date palms in an oasis in Sahara, but an oasis is an oasis wherever you find it, and a few trees make it. There are little places here and there, few enough as the Arabs know, that the Sahara’s deadly sand has never been able to devastate; and there are places even in the Somme that German malice, obeying the Kaiser as the sand of Sahara obeys the accursed sirocco, has not been able to destroy quite to the uttermost. That little cluster of trees at Behagnies is one of these; Divisional Headquarters used to shelter beneath them; and near them was a statue on a lawn which probably stood by the windows of some fine house, though there is no trace of the house but the lawn and that statue now.

And over the way on the left a little further on, just past the officers’ club, a large hall stood where one saw that famous figure, whom officers and men alike would come so far to see.

The hall would hold perhaps four or five hundred seats in front of a stage fitted up very simply with red, white and blue cloths, but fitted up by some one that understood the job; and at the back of that stage on those winter evenings walked on his flat and world-renowned feet the figure of Charlie Chaplin.

When aëroplanes came over bombing, the dynamos used to stop for they supplied light to other places besides the cinema, and the shade of Charlie Chaplin would fade away. But the men would wait till the aëroplanes had gone and that famous figure came waddling back to the screen. There he amused tired men newly come from the trenches, there he brought laughter to most of the twelve days that they had out of the line.

He is gone from Behagnies now. He did not march in the retreat a little apart from the troops, with head bent forward and hand thrust in jacket, a flat-footed Napoleon: yet he is gone; for no one would have left behind for the enemy so precious a thing as a Charlie Chaplin film. He is gone but he will return. He will come with his cane one day along that Arras road to the old hut in Behagnies; and men dressed in brown will welcome him there again.

He will pass beyond it through those desolate plains, and over the hills beyond them, beyond Bapaume. Far hamlets to the east will know his antics.

And one day surely, in old familiar garb, without court dress, without removing his hat, armed with that flexible cane, he will walk over the faces of the Prussian Guard and, picking up the Kaiser by the collar, with infinite nonchalance in finger and thumb, will place him neatly in a prone position and solemnly sit on his chest.

The Oases of Death

While the German guns were pounding Amiens and the battle of dull Prussianism against Liberty raged on, they buried Richthofen in the British lines.

They had laid him in a large tent with his broken machine outside it. Thence British airmen carried him to the quiet cemetery, and he was buried among the cypresses in this old resting place of French generations just as though he had come there bringing no harm to France.

Five wreaths were on his coffin, placed there by those who had fought against him up in the air. And under the wreaths on the coffin was spread the German flag.

When the funeral service was over three volleys were fired by the escort, and a hundred aviators paid their last respects to the grave of their greatest enemy; for the chivalry that the Prussians have driven from earth and sea lives on in the blue spaces of the air.

They buried Richthofen at evening, and the planes came droning home as they buried him, and the German guns roared on and guns answered, defending Amiens. And in spite of all, the cemetery had the air of quiet, remaining calm and aloof, as all French graveyards are. For they seem to have no part in the cataclysm that shakes all the world but them; they seem to withdraw amongst memories and to be aloof from time, and, above all, to be quite untroubled by the war that rages to-day, upon which they appear to look out listlessly from among their cypress and yew, and dimly, down a vista of centuries. They are very strange, these little oases of death that remain unmoved and green with their trees still growing, in the midst of a desolation as far as the eye can see, in which cities and villages and trees and hedges and farms and fields and churches are all gone, and where hugely broods a desert. It is as though Death, stalking up and down through France for four years, sparing nothing, had recognized for his own his little gardens, and had spared only them.

Anglo-Saxon Tyranny

“We need a sea,” says Big-Admiral von Tirpitz, “freed of Anglo-Saxon tyranny.” Unfortunately neither the British Admiralty nor the American Navy permit us to know how much of the Anglo-Saxon tyranny is done by American destroyers and how much by British ships and even trawler. It would interest both countries to know, if it could be known. But the Big-Admiral is unjust to France, for the French navy exerts a tyranny at sea that can by no means be overlooked, although naturally from her position in front of the mouth of the Elbe England practises the culminating insupportable tyranny of keeping the High Seas Fleet in the Kiel Canal.

It is not I, but the Big-Admiral, who chose the word tyranny as descriptive of the activities of the Anglo-Saxon navies. He was making a speech at Dusseldorf on May 25th and was reported in the Dusseldorfer Nachrichten on May 27th.

Naturally it does not seem like tyranny to us, even the contrary; but for an admiral, ein Grosse-Admiral, lately commanding a High Seas Fleet, it must have been more galling than we perhaps can credit to be confined in a canal. There was he, who should have been breasting the blue, or at any rate doing something salty and nautical, far out in the storms of that sea that the Germans call an Ocean, with the hurricane raging angrily in his whiskers and now and then wafting tufts of them aloft to white the halyards; there was he constrained to a command the duties of which however nobly he did them could be equally well carried out by any respectable bargee. He hoped for a piracy of which the Lusitania was merely a beginning; he looked for the bombardment of innumerable towns; he pictured slaughter in many a hamlet of fishermen; he planned more than all those things of which U-boat commanders are guilty; he saw himself a murderous old man, terrible to seafarers, and a scourge of the coasts, and fancied himself chronicled in after years by such as told dark tales of Captain Kidd or the awful buccaneers; but he followed in the end no more desperate courses than to sit and watch his ships on a wharf near Kiel like one of Jacob’s night watchmen.

No wonder that what appears to us no more than the necessary protection of women and children in seacoast towns from murder should be to him an intolerable tyranny. No wonder that the guarding of travellers of the allied countries at sea, and even those of the neutrals, should be a most galling thing to the Big-Admiral’s thwarted ambition, looking at it from the point of view of one who to white-whiskered age has retained the schoolboy’s natural love of the black and yellow flag. A pirate, he would say, has as much right to live as wasps or tigers. The Anglo-Saxon navies, he might argue, have a certain code of rules for use at sea; they let women get first into the boats, for instance, when ships are sinking, and they rescue drowning mariners when they can: no actual harm in all this, he would feel, though it would weaken you, as Hindenburg said of poetry; but if all these little rules are tyrannously enforced on those who may think them silly, what is to become of the pirate? Where, if people like Beattie and Sims had always had their way, would be those rollicking tales of the jolly Spanish Main, and men walking the plank into the big blue sea, and long, low, rakish craft putting in to Indian harbours with a cargo of men and women all hung from the yard-arm? A melancholy has come over the spirit of Big-Admiral von Tirpitz in the years he has spent in the marshes between the Elbe and Kiel, and in that melancholy he sees romance crushed; he sees no more pearl earrings and little gold rings in the hold, he sees British battleships spoiling the Spanish Main, and hateful American cruisers in the old Sargasso Sea; he sees himself, alas, the last of all the pirates.

Let him take comfort. There were always pirates. And in spite of the tyranny of England and America, and of France, which the poor old man perplexed with his troubles forgot, there will be pirates still. Not many perhaps, but enough U-boats will always be able to slip through that tyrannous blockade to spread indiscriminate slaughter amongst the travellers of any nation, enough to hand on the old traditions of murder at sea. And one day Captain Kidd, with such a bow as they used to make in ports of the Spanish Main, will take off his ancient hat, sweeping it low in Hell, and be proud to clasp the hand of the Lord of the Kiel Canal.

Memories

... far-off things And battles long ago.

Those who live in an old house are necessarily more concerned with paying the plumber, should his art be required, or choosing wall paper that does not clash with the chintzes, than with the traditions that may haunt its corridors. In Ireland,--and no one knows how old that is, for the gods that lived there before the Red Branch came wrote few chronicles on the old grey Irish stones and wrote in their own language,--in Ireland we are more concerned with working it so that Tim Flanagan gets the job he does be looking for.

But in America those who remember Ireland remember her, very often, from old generations; maybe their grandfather migrated, perhaps his grandfather, and Ireland is remembered by old tales treasured among them. Now Tim Flanagan will not be remembered in a year’s time when he has the job for which he has got us to agitate, and the jobberies that stir us move not the pen of History.

But the tales that Irish generations hand down beyond the Atlantic have to be tales that are worth remembering. They are tales that have to stand the supreme test, tales that a child will listen to by the fireside of an evening, so that they go down with those early remembered evenings that are last of all to go of the memories of a lifetime. A tale that a child will listen to must have much grandeur. Any cheap stuff will do for us, bad journalism, and novels by girls that could get no other jobs; but a child looks for those things in a tale that are simple and noble and epic, the things that Earth remembers. And so they tell, over there, tales of Sarsfield and of the old Irish Brigade; they tell, of an evening, of Owen Roe O’Neill. And into those tales come the plains of Flanders again and the ancient towns of France, towns famous long ago and famous yet: let us rather think of them as famous names and not as the sad ruins we have seen, melancholy by day and monstrous in the moonlight.

Many an Irishman who sails from America for those historic lands knows that the old trees that stand there have their roots far down in soil once richened by Irish blood. When the Boyne was lost and won, and Ireland had lost her King, many an Irishman with all his wealth in a scabbard looked upon exile as his sovereign’s court. And so they came to the lands of foreign kings, with nothing to offer for the hospitality that was given them but a sword; and it usually was a sword with which kings were well content. Louis XV had many of them, and was glad to have them at Fontenoy; the Spanish King admitted them to the Golden Fleece; they defended Maria Theresa. Landen in Flanders and Cremona knew them. A volume were needed to tell of all those swords; more than one Muse has remembered them. It was not disloyalty that drove them forth; their King was gone, they followed, the oak was smitten and brown were the leaves of the tree.

But no such mournful metaphor applies to the men who march to-day towards the plains where the “Wild Geese” were driven. They go with no country mourning them, but their whole land cheers them on; they go to the inherited battlefields. And there is this difference in their attitude to kings, that those knightly Irishmen of old, driven homeless over-sea, appeared as exiles suppliant for shelter before the face of the Grand Monarch, and he, no doubt with exquisite French grace, gave back to them all they had lost except what was lost forever, salving so far as he could the injustice suffered by each. But to-day when might, for its turn, is in the hands of democracies, the men whose fathers built the Statue of Liberty have left their country to bring back an exiled king to his home, and to right what can be righted of the ghastly wrongs of Flanders.

And if men’s prayers are heard, as many say, old saints will hear old supplications going up by starlight with a certain wistful, musical intonation that has linked the towns of Limerick and Cork with the fields of Flanders before.

The Movement

For many years Eliphaz Griggs was comparatively silent. Not that he did not talk on all occasions whenever he could find hearers, he did that at great length; but for many years he addressed no public meeting, and was no part of the normal life of the northeast end of Hyde Park or Trafalgar Square. And then one day he was talking in a public house where he had gone to talk on the only subject that was dear to him. He waited, as was his custom, until five or six men were present, and then he began. “Ye’re all damned, I’m saying, damned from the day you were born. Your portion is Tophet.”

And on that day there happened what had never happened in his experience before. Men used to listen in a tolerant way, and say little over their beer, for that is the English custom; and that would be all. But to-day a man rose up with flashing eyes and went over to Eliphaz and gripped him by the hand: “They’re all damned,” said the stranger.

That was the turning point in the life of Eliphaz. Up to that moment he had been a lonely crank, and men thought he was queer; but now there were two of them and he became a Movement. A Movement in England may do what it likes: there was a Movement, before the War, for spoiling tulips in Kew Gardens and breaking church windows; it had its run like the rest.

The name of Eliphaz’s new friend was Ezekiel Pim: and they drew up rules for their Movement almost at once; and very soon country inns knew Eliphaz no more. And for some while they missed him where he used to drop in of an evening to tell them they were all damned: and then a man proved one day that the earth was flat, and they all forgot Eliphaz.

But Eliphaz went to Hyde Park and Ezekiel Pim went with him, and there you would see them close to the Marble Arch on any fine Sunday afternoon, preaching their Movement to the people of London. “You are all damned,” said Eliphaz. “Your portion shall be damnation for everlasting.”

“All damned,” added Ezekiel.

Eliphaz was the orator. He would picture Hell to you as it really is. He made you see pretty much what it will be like to wriggle and turn and squirm, and never escape from burning. But Ezekiel Pim, though he seldom said more than three words, uttered those words with such alarming sincerity and had such a sure conviction shining in his eyes that searched right in your face as he said them, and his long hair waved so weirdly as his head shot forward when he said “You’re all damned,” that Ezekiel Pim brought home to you that the vivid descriptions of Eliphaz really applied to you.

People who lead bad lives get their sensibilities hardened. These did not care very much what Eliphaz said. But girls at school, and several governesses, and even some young clergy, were very much affected. Eliphaz Griggs and Ezekiel Pim seemed to bring Hell so near to you. You could almost feel it baking the Marble Arch from two to four on Sundays. And at four o’clock the Surbiton Branch of the International Anarchists used to come along, and Eliphaz Griggs and Ezekiel Pim would pack up their flag and go, for the pitch belonged to the Surbiton people till six; and the crank Movements punctiliously recognize each other’s rights. If they fought among themselves, which is quite unthinkable, the police would run them in; it is the one thing that an anarchist in England may never do.

When the War came the two speakers doubled their efforts. The way they looked at it was that here was a counter-attraction taking people’s minds off the subject of their own damnation just as they had got them to think about it. Eliphaz worked as he had never worked before; he spared nobody; but it was still Ezekiel Pim who somehow brought it most home to them.

One fine spring afternoon Eliphaz Griggs was speaking at his usual place and time; he had wound himself up wonderfully. “You are damned,” he was saying, “for ever and ever and ever. Your sins have found you out. Your filthy lives will be as fuel round you and shall burn for ever and ever.”

“Look here,” said a Canadian soldier in the crowd, “we shouldn’t allow that in Ottawa.”

“What?” asked an English girl.

“Why, telling us we’re all damned like that,” he said.

“Oh, this is England,” she said. “They may all say what they like here.”

“You are all damned,” said Ezekiel, jerking forward his head and shoulders till his hair flapped out behind. “All, all, all damned.”

“I’m damned if I am,” said the Canadian soldier.

“Ah,” said Ezekiel, and a sly look came into his face.

Eliphaz flamed on. “Your sins are remembered. Satan shall grin at you. He shall heap cinders on you for ever and ever. Woe to you, filthy livers. Woe to you, sinners. Hell is your portion. There shall be none to grieve for you. You shall dwell in torment for ages. None shall be spared, not one. Woe everlasting... Oh, I beg pardon, gentlemen, I’m sure.” For the Pacifists’ League had been kept waiting three minutes. It was their turn to-day at four.

Nature’s Cad

The claim of Professor Grotius Jan Beek to have discovered, or learned, the language of the greater apes has been demonstrated clearly enough. He is not the original discoverer of the fact that they have what may be said to correspond with a language; nor is he the first man to have lived for some while in the jungle protected by wooden bars, with a view to acquiring some knowledge of the meaning of the various syllables that gorillas appear to utter. If so crude a collection of sounds, amounting to less than a hundred words, if words they are, may be called a language, it may be admitted that the Professor has learned it, as his recent experiments show. What he has not proved is his assertion that he has actually conversed with a gorilla, or by signs, or grunts, or any means whatever obtained an insight, as he put it, into its mentality, or, as we should put it, its point of view. This Professor Beek claims to have done; and though he gives us a certain plausible corroboration of a kind which makes his story appear likely, it should be borne in mind that it is not of the nature of proof.

The Professor’s story is briefly that having acquired this language, which nobody that has witnessed his experiments will call in question, he went back to the jungle for a week, living all the time in the ordinary explorer’s cage of the Blik pattern. Towards the very end of the week a big male gorilla came by, and the Professor attracted it by the one word “Food.” It came, he says, close to the cage, and seemed prepared to talk but became very angry on seeing a man there, and beat the cage and would say nothing. The Professor says that he asked it why it was angry. He admits that he had learned no more than forty words of this language, but believes that there are perhaps thirty more. Much however is expressed, as he says, by mere intonation. Anger, for instance; and scores of allied words, such as terrible, frightful, kill, whether noun, verb or adjective, are expressed, he says, by a mere growl. Nor is there any word for “Why,” but queries are signified by the inflexion of the voice.

When he asked it why it was angry the gorilla said that men killed him, and added a noise that the professor said was evidently meant to allude to guns. The only word used, he says, in this remark of the gorilla’s was the word that signified “man.” The sentence as understood by the professor amounted to “Man kill me. Guns.” But the word “kill” was represented simply by a snarl, “me” by slapping its chest, and “guns” as I have explained was only represented by a noise. The Professor believes that ultimately a word for guns may be evolved out of that noise, but thinks that it will take many centuries, and that if during that time guns should cease to be in use, this stimulus being withdrawn, the word will never be evolved at all, nor of course will it be needed.

The Professor tried, by evincing interest, ignorance, and incredulity, and even indignation, to encourage the gorilla to say more; but to his disappointment, all the more intense after having exchanged that one word of conversation with one of the beasts, the gorilla only repeated what it had said, and beat on the cage again. For half an hour this went on, the Professor showing every sign of sympathy, the gorilla raging and beating upon the cage.